Book Cart Gymnastics

Interesting Endpapers

Endpapers are "the double leaves added to the book by the binder that become the pastedowns [because they are glued to the back of the covers] and free [not glued] endpapers inside the front and rear covers." (Definition from IOBA Book Terminology.)


Most endpapers in modern books are blank white pages, but they can be decorative, colored, or printed with something having to do with the contents of the book, as in the endpapers pictured here from  a book called Spiders by Michael Chinery.  The images of a multi-eyed beast marching across these pages depict "movements from the balletic courtship dance of a jumping spider."  The author goes on to explain the spider's sex life, but you'll have to read the book for that.  I'll just give you this little tidbit:  "With both palps charged, the male is ready for action." Yow.

Here are some more examples of endpaper design:

From Mother West Wind's Neighbors by Thornton W. Burgess (1913).

From A New Path to the Waterfall by Raymond Carver (1989).

From Trees, Shrubs and Flowers to Know in Washington by C.P. Lyons (1956).

From The Devil Wagon in God's Country by Michael L. Berger (1979).

From a German book called Michelangelo by Fritz Knapp (1907).

From Strawberry Girl by Lois Lenski (1946).

Reading Notes

As usual, I've been reading about five books at once, but I actually completed two of them.

The Last of the Live Nude Girls:  A Memoir by Sheila McClear (Soft Skull Press, 2011), as the title states, is the story of a stripper in New York City's Times Square peep shows  in 2006.  It's a fast read, kind of like Retail Hell for bookstore clerks, in that it describes interactions with annoying "customers", but naked.  And so worse.  One thing I noticed was how our narrator often refers to other strippers as being "old" when they are over thirty.  I guess it's all a matter of perspective.  The back of the book has a twelve page history of peep shows in NYC.

I also read The Living (HarperPerrenial, 1992), an epic novel by Annie Dillard set in the Northwest in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.  This book took me about three weeks to read, in part because it was 445 pages long, but also because I only wanted to read two or three of the short chapters at a time, as it was otherwise overwhelming.  The Living has lots of characters to keep track of - there's a handy list of characters at the front of the book - and covers a good deal of time and events.  I particularly enjoyed the local history, such as Native-white relations, the booms and busts of the frontier towns, and how to fell giant trees and make cedar shingles.

Book Sale: 20% off, Now until October 31

We are having a 20% off sale for all our inventory that has been listed prior to today.  The prices shown in our listings on our website are the sale prices with the reduction already taken.  We had  a successful 20% off sale in August for our books through Abebooks, with prices remaining the same on other bookselling sites.  So now we want to see if the same sale will attract customers to order from us directly.  

One way customers find us is through  Bookfinder.com , a search engine that searches over 150 million books for sale.  I noticed recently that now Bookfinder lists independent bookstores with the following identifying logo:

Pistil Books Online

United States

Neat!  Also, I recently sent a note to Bookfinder through  their comment form and was pleased and surprised that a real person replied to my message the next day.


In news from IOBA (Independent Online Booksellers Association):


I am pleased to announce that the latest issue of The Standard, the official newsletter of the IOBA (Independent Online Booksellers Association), has been published and is available here:
http://ioba.org/standard/
This marks the first all-new issue in almost three years and there are some great articles: on dealer discounts, on famed booksellers Leona Rostenberg and Madeleine B. Stern, literary travels, yours truly on the importance of turnover, as well as reviews, book fair reports and member profiles.
The newsletter is available for all booksellers and bibliophiles. But if you like what you see, do hope you'll consider joining:
http://ioba.org/
Thanks for your attention.
-Brian Cassidy,
Editor The IOBA Standard
books@briancassidy.net
http://www.briancassidy.net
Member: ABAA, ILAB, IOBA

100% Destruction Guaranteed

We received a Spam email from Book-Destruction.com, advertising their service.  I particularly liked this phrase:  "When your load of books arrives at our facility, it will immediately be ground into tiny fragments.."   How reassuring!  The gist of the marketing is that by destroying your books for you, the company is keeping them from being re-sold by someone else.  I also like how their process "eliminates workers handling the books, thus eliminating the enormous desire to sell the books"  -  and the desire to read them, too?

Reading Notes

Well, I've been remiss in listing my recent reads, but here they are:

Nancy Culpepper:  Stories by Bobbie Ann Mason.  These stories are all about the same rural Kentucky family, and though they could certainly be read separately, the whole collection adds up to kind of a novel.  The speech of the characters, particularly Nancy's mother, Lila,  reminds of my own Texan grandmother's turns of phrases:  "I'm hotter than a she-wolf in a pepper patch!"  "They was sour enough to make a pig squeal!"

Snow by Orhan Pamuk:  I only read the first 100 pages of this one, then I quit.  I picked it up because Pamuk is Turkish and won the Nobel Prize, and there's a recommendation by Atwood on the cover, but I found it just plain boring. 

Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro.  I finally ordered a copy of Alice Munro's last collection (published 2009), after the price on the internet came down to a dollar.  This was kind of interesting experience in buying from an evil megalister.  The book actually arrived in a padded envelope, not just a tyvek wrapper, as is the usual practice.  It was described accurately, if vaguely, as "Good with average wear to cover, pages, and binding."  The stories themselves were classic Munro - not about happiness!  She's one of my favorites, and I finished it in two days, having read at least three of the stories previously, probably in The New Yorker.

Other than that, I've been continuing to read back issues of Granta, and the latest issues of Harper's.

Art Wall Party

Here at Pistil Books, we not only promote literature and reading, but we are proponents of the visual arts as well.  We had our almost-annual Art Wall Party last Friday.  The Art Wall, a.k.a. Gallerie d'Alley is the outside of our neighbor's dilapidated garage.  One of the gallery walls faces the small parking lot of his apartment building, while the other gallery hangs over the dumpsters and faces the alley.

The beginnings of the Art Wall are controversial:  different people claim to have installed the first painting over a dozen years ago.  In my hazy memory, this was a scene of cowboys gathered around a campfire, put up by Pistil staff person Tim.  Another early work was the vase of three flowers and their shadows against a bright yellow background that Sean and I found put out with the trash at the other end of the alley - and which still hangs today.

Somewhere along the line, rules for submission of artwork to the Gallerie developed, and the hangings took place at a rowdy (fistfights have almost broken out; paintings have been burned; others have been tossed onto the roof of the garage; artwork has been stolen) barbecue potluck:

Submission Guidelines for the Gallerie d'Alley:

• Artwork must be original
• Artwork must not have cost more than $3
• Artists' statements optional 

Old paintings and other artwork that have weathered sufficiently are removed - and sometimes moved to local telephone poles - by the democratic vote of the crowd, or by the autocratic decision of the wielder of the screw gun, Sean.  Thus room is made for the new crop of masterpieces.

Please take a virtual tour of the Gallerie d'Alley:

Photos of the 2011 art wall by Prima Seadiva

Photos of our guests, themselves works of art

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. 

A Successful Book Sale

Our annual outdoor book sale, held Saturday, went very well.  The weather was sunny and gorgeous - maybe a given for other parts of the country at the end of July, but rain is always possible in Seattle. We had a steady stream of customers the entire time.  Michael, a friend from the local thrift store, commented that never had he seen so many "sale" signs on the neighborhood telephone poles.  Armed with a staple gun, Sean, Troy, and I were a match for the local band poster installers, putting up 200 photocopied signs ("free lemonade, beer, panties!"), as well as a couple dozen hand-lettered signs and re-purposed real estate condo sandwich boards (those sign boards are actually illegal in Seattle, but the law is unenforced).

  

Sean's father, Bert, who was in town to celebrate his 86th birthday was our trusty cashier.

We visited with neighbors, friends, old customers from our brick-and-mortar, former employees, local artists and writers, and many people who were new to Pistil.  By the end of the day, we had made a dent in the more than a thousand books put out for the sale, there was more room on our shelves for new stock, and Sean and I were off  to the beach.

Thanks to Tim, Michele, Troy, and Bert!