A Punchy President's Day

Although it wasn't "officially" a Pistil Books event, Sean and I  had a President's Day Party this weekend.  A couple of friends, Russell (who is featured in Pistil Readings and has published zines on cocktail culture) and Evan, concocted delicious historical punches for the occasion:  Fish House Punch and United Service Punch.

We asked our guests to dress in presidential attire and consequently had two Lincolns, a Dwight Eisenhower, the Queen of England (well, that was Sean), some diplomats from African nations, several stunning First Lady-looking types, a sneaky security contingent, and quite a few grungy protesters and anarchists (this being Seattle). 

And of course no presidential affair would complete without the press, in this case The Stranger's Party Crasher.

Here's CIA Agent Candiotti and the Queen.





















The high point of the evening were the presentations at the podium, which included The Queen of England reading from John Sinclair's Guitar Army ("free money!  f***ing in the streets!"); a rant in favor of the Puritans; some punchy thoughts by Lincoln; lovely patriotic songs; the presidential seal presenting a re-enactment of an encounter between Monica Lewinsky and Clinton; and an impassioned critique of secularism, which made use of all the occurrences of the word "ass" in the King James Bible. 

Here we have a dashing pair of Jackie O supporters.

Trudi , a candidate for class president of Beaver High School, gives the Beaver victory sign.

The Presidential Seal prepares his presentation.

All in all, it was a very fun evening, complete with first family paper dolls.

Luckily, no assassinations took place.

A Detailed Description

Here at Pistil Books we don't use the automatic pricing system often used by giant warehouse companies such as Better World Books wherein books are unloaded by forklift and dumped on a conveyor to be scanned and priced by a machine with little or no attention paid to their condition -- or whether the pricing makes sense to anyone but a computer...   Here we take the time to look at a book, inspect it and grade it and then look to see on a few sites what would be an appropriate price for our copy.   So we get to see a great many descriptions written by other booksellers.  It is to the general degradation of the industry that has come to treat books like crushed cans or recycled flotsam to which the book descriptions found below are dedicated.

Book Description: Stockton, California, U.S.A.: Lamm-Morada Pub Co, 1979. No Binding. Book Condition: Fine. 1st Edition. fine copy. Bookseller Inventory # 496j

Sounds like a great copy except for that lack of binding problem.  Hard to read in the wind. 

From Mathom House Books

Los Angeles County Museum, 1984. Trade. Book Condition: Used. We do our best to describe each book accurately. Any discrepency [sic] between what is described and what is pulled will be noted in an email. If you would like a detailed description beyond what has been provided, please ask.

Apparently "doing our best" to describe each book accurately is to determine if it is "new" or "used."  . 

From Sparks Distribution Service:

American Chemical Society, 1978. Book Condition: Good. Average used book with all pages present. Possible loose bindings, highlighting, cocked spine or torn dust jackets. Ex-Library. Ex-Library.

I like how "an average used book" can have "possible loose bindings," because not only is this not at all "average" for a used book , but of course it would have more than one binding: there's the invisible one to count also.  So I get a copy with a loose binding, highlighting all over the place and a spine that looks like a chiropractor's nightmare and this is called "good," and "average" instead of  "poor."   It seems the Spark is a little weak.  It's great too how an outfit like this will make a blanket description that they'll then apply to thousands of books and even then they won't take the care to make the description make any sense to start with. 

From Sparks Distribution Service:

University of California Press, 1966. Book Condition: Very Good. Attractive. Shows some signs of wear and is no longer fresh.

Albeit the book in question has to do with native plants, the application of adjectives usually reserved for produce to book descriptions is quizzical.  We would ask if the copy is  crisp and lush, or if the pages are wilted.

From Mathom House Books Inc:

Stanford University Press, 1955. Hardcover. Book Condition: Used. We do our best to describe each book accurately. Any discrepency [sic] between what is described and what is pulled will be noted in an email. If you would like a detailed description beyond what has been provided, please ask.

I do hope they're not working too hard at "doing their best" there; we do know it’s a book, with hardcovers and it’s used.    I guess the only  “discrepency”  they might make at this point is by shipping a "New" book with no covers.  A "detailed description" would perhaps note if the book had been run over by a truck or been gnashed by a ravenous rottweiler. 

From Look at a Book:

Macmillan of Canada, 1981. Hardcover. Book Condition: Good. DUST JACKET WORN AS IT HAS SERVED IT'S [sic] PURPOSE AND PROTECTED THE BOOK, PAGES SLIGHTLY TANNED Good: Typical used book. All pages and cover intact (including dust cover, if applicable). The spine may show signs of wear. Pages can include limited notes and highlighting. Occasionally these may be former library books. Overall you will be surprised at how good our used books are. We just want to remind you that this is a used book. Satisfaction Guaranteed!

Overall, I will be surprised if they learn to use punctuation.  They have served their purpose and can now go out of business.  I just want to remind them TO USE A LOT OF CAPITALS WHEN MAKING DUMB COMMENTARY WHEN VENTING THEIR PIQUE AT ANYONE WHO WANTS A BOOK WITH A DUST JACKET THAT HAS NOT BEEN TRASHED BECAUSE IT  WAS HANDLED LIKE SO MUCH RECYCLING. 

From RUSTYLEEE

EOS, 2011. Soft cover. Book Condition: Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Fine. 1st Edition. ***ADVANCE READERS COPY(ARC)***SOFT COVER***UNREAD****ARTWORK COVER***RACHEL MORGAN IS IN TROUBLE.6 X 9.439 PAGES.EOS.MARCH 2011***ADVANCE READERS COPY***SOFT COVER***. Bookseller Inventory # 5976

Lessee here, twice it's mentioned in caps that this is a soft cover, so there shouldn't be too much question about that, yet the d.j. is "Fine."  Maybe if it's not in caps it doesn't count.  Then it's an ARC, but no wait, it's a first, again the caps may win out here, plus ARC is mentioned twice again.  I think the main point is that RACHEL MORGAN (apparently a moniker for RUSTYLEEE) *****IS IN TROUBLE!!!!!!!*******

 -- Blog entry by Sean

Return to Sender

We just received back in the mail a package with an "unclaimed" sticker and no postage due that had been sent to South Africa last March, ten months ago.  The book ordered was called Living on 12 Volts with Ample Power and it was going to our customer in care of his yacht club.  When the customer didn't receive the book in the expected time frame, he emailed me and I was able to find another copy of this fairly unusual expensive book (and ours had been signed by the authors, although that probably wasn't its selling point), and send the new copy via registered mail to South Africa, rather than via the flat rate priority mail envelope, which only costs $13.45 to mail, but does not have tracking.   We rarely have problems with books not reaching their destination, and I had no problems sending to South Africa previously, but occasionally packages are "lost."  So I just figured the book had been lost or stolen and shrugged my shoulders.

The returned package was pretty worn around the edges, and there was a tear at one corner, but inside the book (which had been double wrapped in a recycled used priority mail envelope) was still in the "Near Fine" shape it had left our store in.

I emailed our customer with the news:

Hi G.  Just wanted to let you know that today I received back the gone-missing of Living On 12 Volts you ordered from us last March.  It was returned in its original packing with no postage due, with a stamp from the South Africa post office marked "unclaimed."  We're glad to have it back, something I never expected.  Hope life is well on your boat.

 

He responded:   Hi Amy.  Wow, I am amazed, that is really good news, I was convinced it had been stolen, I went to so many different post offices in Durban looking for it.  We are now in Tanzania, sailing/chartering around Zanzibar, and things are going well.  The book has been most useful, its my electrical bible!
Thanks for letting me know, its a relief all round I think.  Kind regards, G.

Another book sent to a different customer in South Africa, also was apparently "lost' in September.  It may show up yet.

 

Reading Notes

I have been reading a lot less since before the Christmas holidays... but I am currently reading Zadie Smith's White Teeth.  I'm only about a quarter of the way into it so far, but I recognized one section as something I had read an excerpt from previously.  It's well-written and quite funny.

A New Year

So far, so good.   The holidays passed for us in a pretty low-key fashion.  Everyone always asks if business picks up at Christmas, and though we certainly do get some orders for gifts, mostly we see an increase in sales at the times of school semesters starting, like now.  Sean and I don't really participate in exchanging presents, but I do like to make a collage calendar to give out at New Year's.  Last year we collaborated on a 13-page black and white calendar with a color cover, but this year we didn't get anything so elaborate together in time.  Instead, I just made a one-page color collage with tear-off monthly calendar pages. So now we're going to work on next year's collages throughout the year, instead of at the last minute.  I have to say, I do like how everything's closed and quiet on Christmas and New Year's Day; a nice break from the otherwise constant work and consumerism of our culture.

Reading Notes
I am in the middle of reading Frozen in Time:  The Fate of the Franklin Expedition by Owen Beattie and John Geiger.  This is a book I decided to read because the cover has a pretty gruesome photo of the face of a frozen body from the expedition, the introduction is by Margaret Atwood, and the first few pages were coming out, making it unsaleable anyway-- hence the reading choices of booksellers.  The Franklin Expedition was searching for the Northwest Passage in the 1840's, but all 129 men on the two ships died, most likely from lead poisoning from eating canned food.  Canning was the big new technology for provisioning expeditions and lead poisoning wasn't yet understood.  This book tells the history of the Franklin Expedition and the subsequent investigations by later explorers and anthropologists in the area who attempted to figure out what happened by talking to Inuit Natives and looking for physical evidence-- both of which also indicated that the expedition members resorted to cannibalism in their desperation.

I also re-read a novel by Anita Brookner, Bay of Angels.  Anita Brookner is a writer I like, but her novels are all very similar, usually having to do with an isolated daughter dealing with her parents' aging and death, all told from a very interior monologue.  Not that much happens, except for daily life, yet her writing is absorbing.

 

Book Desire

 Sean and I recently watched a film based on (and named after) Michael Pollan's book, The Botany of Desire, which tells the history of four different plants and how they have evolved with help from humans:  apples, potatoes, marijuana, and tulips.  The premise is that while we think we are so clever at using certain plants for our own benefit, although plants don't "think", they are using us humans for their own advancement, as our desire and cultivation of them has made their propagation successful.  For instance, flowers are desirable to humans because of their beauty.  The most extreme example of flowers' desirability is shown in the tulip craze of 17th century Holland, when a single bulb sold for as much as a house.

We just received an order from a book dealer in the Netherlands for fourteen gardening books.  We sell quite a lot of books going to other countries, probably about a quarter of our sales, but rarely such a nice big stack going to one person, as shipping the books costs almost as much as the books themselves.  It's a good feeling to have a colleague in Holland, land of the tulip and beautiful gardens, choose books from our stock.


Reading Notes
I just read After Dark, a very short novel, by Haruki Murakami.  I had read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles a couple of years ago on the recommendation of a friend.  Both books had a dreamy (in fact, one of the characters in After Dark is asleep), surreal quality and I kept wanting there to be a clear explanation for what was happening, but to no avail.  In After Dark, this dreaminess was juxtaposed with scenes of modern Japanese pop culture:  alienated youth, cell phones (okay, maybe these things aren't particularly Japanese), Denny's (not Japanese), love motels (Japnanese!), convenience stores, motorcycles, names of songs.

I'm also reading The Penguin Anthology of Short Stories by Canadian Women and Moving Targets:  Writing with Intent 1982-2004 by Margaret Atwood, which is a book of occasional pieces, including many book reviews.

RIP Joe, our neighbor

Joe LaMagno, who lived across the alley from the bookstore and who was a daily presence in our neighborhood was murdered just half a block away last week on November 22.  We will miss him.

Joe Dead

Joe with Simone with the crooked paw out at the gate,
Joe talking, yelling at the dogs, plaintive but not demanding,
Joe talking slowly and having his cigarette,
Joe coughing,
Joe, everybody's friend,
Joe of no evil,
Easygoing,
Joe of no complaint,
Joe with the little pipe and the little stash,
Who would suck until his lungs could get no bigger,
Joe in the cap and the coat, huddled,
Joe of no ambition,
Joe of routine, of stationary positioning,
Joe who preferred the alley to the street,
Protector of dogs,
Of chores and trips to the 7-11,
Joe with his long hair and easy laugh,
Friend to Troy and anyone who wanted to chat,
Joe leaning on the street with two dogs pulling,
Joe who would yell but not discipline,
Joe who reserved his enthusiasm,
Joe who would pour water into a dumpster instead of calling 9-11,
Joe who I never saw eat anything,
Whose place I never visited in the ten years I saw him at the back gate,
Joe who was not a gossip but sometimes had news,
Joe who was not optimistic about life,
Who thought about moving back in with his parents and quitting smoking and drinking,
But liked his routine enough to start it again each day,
Who tried indoor baseball but didn't like it too much,
Who was not old but resigned even so,
Who was not a health nut,
Who smoked and coughed and coughed and smoked and coughed and coughed and coughed,
Who appreciated simplicity,
But was complicated enough to know a simple life was not so simple,
Who wouldn't pick a fight,
Who liked getting high,
Friend to beer,
Whose environmental foot print was quite small,
Who never hit the dogs,
Buzzed sometimes but not drunk,
Who did not demand to be greeted,
Who left without a sound,
Phantom Joe,
But visited, or waited in a pall for visitors,
Who was harmless in every way, but to himself,
Who almost everyone liked,
Joe, pretty content,
Of little means and smaller claims,
Who trained Simone to sit in the open gate but not Jake,
Joe who would praise the sky but not complain about it,
Joe lacking bitterness, knowing humility,
Not unhappy,
Who didn't seize life, but cooperated with most of it,
Whose eye was calm if not always focused,
Who didn't want to interfere,
Joe who would like to help out but was no longer strong,
Who never asked for favors,
Never borrowed a buck,
Who let Simone bark for hours in the middle of the night when she pinned a possum beneath the shed,
Because he couldn't catch her,
"She was wild," he said,
Joe who doesn't expect you to be friendly,
But is always friendly himself,
Joe who not everyone is warm to,
Joe on his way to the 7 -11, walking slowly,
Joe dead on the sidewalk,
Passing quickly into death instead of slowly,
By the hand of someone far more unfortunate than him,
Dead Joe,
Dead Joe,
May his smoke linger in the heavens,
His body mix in the soil,
What does it mean Joe,
That we will only know you now
In our minds,
In our hearts,
In ourselves?

-- Sean Carlson

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.