What Goes Where

A sample of some books that sold recently and where they were shipped:

• Here Come the Regulars:  How to Run a Record Label;  O'Fallon, IL
• Rock Candy [graphic novel];  San Diego, CA
• Lenin's Final Fight:  Speeches and Writings;  St. Paul, MN
• Maritime Northwest Garden Guide;  Oak Harbor, WA
• The Complete Book of Knots;  San Diego, CA
• Informal Lectures on Formal Semantics;  Roseville, MN
• Stellas & Stratocasters:  An Anthology;  Lily Dale, NY
• Children and Television;  Austin, TX
• Vancouver, Howe Sound, and the Sunshine Coast;  Wenatchee, WA
• Slave Hunter: One Man's Global Quest to Free Victims of Human Trafficking;  Austin, TX
• Boundaries of Jewish Identity;  Hyattsville, MD
• Open Wounds:  A Native American Heritage;  Corvallis, OR
• Zarathustra's Secret:  The Interior Life of Friedrich Nietzsche;  Rockville,MD
• Friend of My Youth [by Alice Munro];  Alta, CA
• The Heart of Yoga;  Ashburn, VA
• Deities and Dolphins:  The Story of the Nabataeans;  Fayetteville, AR
• Advanced Karate;  San Juan, Argentina
• A River Lost:  The Life and Death of the Columbia;  Bainbridge Island, WA
• Black Marxism:  The Making of the Black Radical Tradition;  Brooklyn, NY
• Ravenna;  Tybee Island, GA
• Income and Wealth Inequality in the Netherlands;  Lisboa, Portugal
• Corrosion Fatigue:  Chemistry, Mechanics and Microstructure;  Toledo, OH
• The Adventures of Old Mr. Toad; Old Granny Fox; Mother West Wind's Animal Friends [three books];  Stevens, PA
• The Culture of Make Believe;  Owings Mills, MD
• Modern Yucatecan Maya Pottery Making;  Whitefish, MT
• Pindar's Olympian One:  A Commentary;  London, England 
• A Taste of Turkish Cuisine;  Pacific, WA

It's nice to see that we had four customers from our own state.  Three books went to Maryland, and two to Austin, Texas.  Only three books went out of the country, fewer than usual.  Normally we have quite a few Canadian orders.

Reading Notes:


After seeing notices on bookselling forums that the known book thief John Gilkey was currently on the loose, I read The Man Who Loved Books Too Much by Allison Hoover Bartlett.  Although this was in trade paperback format, it read more like a long article.  Gilkey didn't seem like a particularly "interesting" book thief to me:  he stole books (using Modern Library's list of the one hundred best English-language novels of the twentieth century as his guide) by using credit card numbers gleaned from customers at Saks Fifth Avenue where he worked as a clerk.  Luckily, since we don't deal in very rare or expensive books, credit card fraud has not been a problem for Pistil Books Online.  When we were a retail store,  Pistil Books & News, however, both shoplifting and people trying to sell stolen books were a constant problem in our shop.  We still have our "do not buy" manila folder filled with polaroids of shady characters--sometimes smiling, sometimes giving the finger-- and descriptions of known book thieves that were distributed amongst the local bookstores.  Ah, an aspect of running a bookstore I certainly do not miss.

I also read a pretty forgettable novel called The World Beneath by Cate Kennedy.  It was a family drama about a teenage girl who goes on a backpacking trip with her estranged father and things go wrong.