Tag Archives: bookstores

Pluck It….

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Okay, so I’m just a quiet little person with a happy small life who runs a sweet wee bookstore in the middle of nowhere. I like it that way. New York doesn’t know me, and DC sure doesn’t ask my opinion about anything–or, for that matter, care to hear it offered unsolicited.

I just run a bookstore. That’s enough politics–large and small “p”–for me. So let me say this one thing, and then I’ll go back to being that cheerful pudgy woman who sells books and keeps her mouth shut about the crap flying around in the real world.

“IT’S A SODDING SANDWICH AND THEY’RE BLOODY PUPPETS! NOW WOULD YOU PLEASE GET OVER YOUR TOO-EARNEST-BY-HALF SELVES!”

I understand economic sanctions. I still assign my college students the film “Food, Inc.” and ask on the final exam why bovine hormone milk got pulled off Walmart’s shelves  (Answer: D because shoppers voted with their wallets by not buying it).

But I have cousins who think I’m halfway down the slippery laundry chute to Hell because I still shop at Lowe’s (when my local hardware doesn’t have what I need) and EVERYBODY knows that Lowe’s supports “the homosexual agenda.”

I’m sorry, but I have many gay and lesbian friends, most of whom couldn’t organize their way out of a paper bag.

Yet now those friends are threatening to cut me off if I continue displaying in my shop the cow calendar from Chick-Fil-A. (They put out a very funny one with parodies of literary classics, like “Old Mooler,” and “Jack the Flipper.”)

Get over it, lads and ladies; I think those cows are cute – sometimes cuter than you. The calendar stays. I’m not taking advice on what not to eat from a pig wearing way too much mascara and bling for daytime television, nor accepting religious guilt from a cow.

Put bluntly, Chick-Fil-A and the Muppets are each corporations having a field day with the marketing boom from this gleeful exchange of crossfire. Keep playing these stupid games, you two, and I will learn to live without either of you. It’s not like you have feelings. It’s not like you’re people.

It’s more like you’re laughing all the way to the bank at how easy it is to wind up those little toys called consumers…..

Now please leave me alone to finish this chicken strips basket, so I can go back to working my bookstore. Thank you.

Dust and Ideas

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Someone asked me recently, “What’s that lovely smell, the one you get in old bookshops, made of?”

Dust and ideas, as near as I can tell. And it’s not nearly so esoteric as one might think.

This past Friday some synchronicity appeared when two very different pals from the book world forwarded information on book smells. Lara in Canada sent the above photo about a new (quite nicely packaged) perfume called “Paper Passion.” And my agency, Harold Ober, tweeted this link:

@bookstorewendy: As the authority on Old Book Smells, what do you say to this analysis? mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives…

As the mentalfloss article states, old books carry “a combination of grassy notes with a tang of acids and a hint of vanilla over an underlying mustiness.” Yes, we all agree that the smell of books presents their history–and that it’s a pretty nice smell, to have inspired a perfume!

The vanilla-and-acid analysis is poetic, and as Charles Lamb said, “A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog’s ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins.” Plus, I have this somewhat silly idea that old books are heavier because they take in not only smells from their readers, but weight, from their readers’ minds.

As a college student I often helped a friend who worked in Psych Services check the meeting rooms before locking up at night. Sometimes when we opened the door of one of those little counseling cubicles, the heaviness of what had been discussed in there lingered on the very air. I don’t mean “vibes and aura” stuff, just that there was a palpable (usually dark) residue in those rooms.

Of course, not all thoughts are ponderous and ominous like thunderclouds; some are featherlight, airy as sunbeams. No matter which, it just makes sense that people reading books, pulling ideas out of them, leave a little of themselves behind–be that the breath of thought or the breadcrumbs of lunch.

All those leftovers contribute to the book’s smell, its appearance, its personality, if you will. This is something bibliophiles know and respect. In our bookstore, we often see people stop just inside the door and take a big sniff. And we know he or she is honoring the long history of humanity’s eternal library, inhaling that wafting odor of dust and ideas.