Holiday Craft Sale

Our friends at Petti Rosso Cafe, 1101 East Pike, are having a holiday craft sale this Friday from 2pm to 8pm.  Several of the Petti Rosso staff  and others will be selling their wares:  lampshades, knitted hats, glass lanterns, laptop / ipad / iphone covers, cards,  cookies and candy, and other delightful items.  I will be there selling recycled ex-library blank books and some hand printed cards.  I have a new batch of blank books ready to go, thanks to the help of the marvelous Troy Carlson, who is also Pistil Books' packing and shipping department.  I take apart the books, cut the paper, and choose any pages that may be re-bound with the blank pages.  Troy is the one who binds the blank text block, first with glue, then with a drill and thread, adding headbands (the colorful decoration at top and bottom of spine), and a ribbon bookmark.  Then I re-assemble the blank text block back into the library binding.  I hope anyone reading this in Seattle will stop by and say hello.

Reading Notes
I just finished another past issue of Granta magazine with the theme  "Women and Children First", which had a horrific account of the inside of a refugee camp in Rwanda, "The Problem Outside" by Linda Polman.  I'm also reading a collection of short stories called Tales from Firozsha Baag by Rohinton Mistry, set in an apartment complex in Bombay.  I had previously read Mistry's great novel, A Fine Balance.