Pistil Books had our annual outdoor book sale yesterday, offering close to a thousand books culled from our shelves (making room for more!) for one and two dollars. I spent the past week, along with Kam, our newest staff person, pulling books for the sale. The selection was pretty good, about two-thirds non-fiction of all sorts to one-third fiction; lots of great books that are just "too common" on the internet market.
Our first customer of the day was
Jon Strongbow, a longtime Pistil customer and friend who brought us the gift of a signed copy of
The Ocean of Time, his beautiful dreamlike publication featuring realistic (and surrealistic) drawings of Seattle locales.
Lots of friends came by to hang out, catch up, and drink lemonade and beer. One group largely made up of current and former Pistil staff discussed mushroom hunting while another group of motorcyclists caused my eyes to glaze over with their bike talk.
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| "The mushroom was this big!" |
A young man dressed all in black, a vegan, was happy to purchase a copy of the classic eighties book
Knitting Wildlife. He thought he could get his sister to knit him a sweater from the patterns in the book, perhaps the "Extinction is Forever" cardigan.
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| Grrrrrrrrr. |
Sean and I enjoyed looking through the titles people had chosen as they brought up their stacks of books to purchase. As one woman handed me her pile of three books, she asked, "Do you have to look at them?" rather irritatedly. She had
Sexual Perversity in Chicago sandwiched in the middle of her small pile, upside down.
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| A customer's stack. | | | | |
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| Kneeling in the stacks. |
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| Tim proudly wears his Pistil T-shirt. |
We have often wondered if this is an effective way to cull stock. How did the sale do from a business standpoint?
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