Why Pistil Books?

I am being interviewed by the IOBA (Independent Online Booksellers Association) for a feature on their website, and one of the questions that has come up is why we chose the name Pistil Books.  This has been an oft-asked question during the life of our store, and quite frequently we've been mistakenly thought to be Pistol Books.

Here's a postcard we used to send out (images and definitions from a children's dictionary) by way of explanation.

We chose the name Pistil Books because we liked the play of the word pistil, a female flower part, versus pistol, a gun. A homophone with two very different meanings. From the sound of the word, it's unclear which pistil/pistol we are.  As a part of a flower, pistil evokes the idea of growing, living, flowering... and in the case of books, flowering knowledge.  A slogan for Pistil Books (it's printed on our bookmarks) is "Seed your head."  

We have used flowers as a theme for our business - our retail store had a stained glass sunflower window, as well as a colorful flower mosaic we made on the floor (it's still there - though our old retail storefront is now a burrito joint). 

We now have flower mosaics around the exterior door of our office/warehouse, a lovely vintage three-dimensional scientific model of a pistil on a shelf above my desk, and a flower/bee/knowledge theme on our website.

Crap Hound

When Pistil Books was a retail store, one of our specialties was zines - those small, independent, often self-published periodicals that embodied alternative culture in the days before the internet and electronic publishing.  Crap Hound, edited by Sean Tejaratchi, was one of our favorites and a best-seller.  Crap Hound is packed with high-contrast black and white images gathered from vintage commercial and graphic art based on a theme.  Past issues have covered the subjects of  Bait, Devils & Clowns;  Hands, Hearts & Eyes; Death, Telephones & Scissors; and Church & State.

We are pleased to offer for sale the latest Crap Hound #8: Superstition published by Show & Tell Press.

Flipping through the pages, here are some of the multitude of images you'll see:  Butterflies and moths, apples, New Year's bells, black cats, hats, crows, fish, wrapped packages, horseshoes, books, doors, boots, owls, snakes, storks, fences, and more.

More Found in Books

The program for Raymond Burr's Memorial Service from 1993

A lovely drawing.

So many things pressed between pages.

There was also a letter to Dan Savage.

Book Plates

There's a great show of  book plates and ex libris prints at Davidson Galleries in Seattle's Pioneer Square that just ended (okay, I meant to post this earlier).  The book plates displayed in the gallery are miniature prints made by artists to show book ownership.  "Ex libris" means "from the library of."


We come across book plates in our inventory, though they are usually of the mass produced kind that you can buy in a bookstore or stationery store in a box, with a blank space for your name. Often these commercially made book plates are prints of famous pieces of art.  Sometimes they are reading and/or book themed.  I remember receiving a gift such a box of book plates in sixth grade:  the classic image of the cat on top of a stack of books.

Here are some book plates discovered in our current inventory:

Pegasus leaping over a rainbow - found in Richard Wagner:  A Mystic in the Making.

The artwork is by Braldt Bralds; found in The Communication Ethics Controversy.

It's Hokusai's The Great Wave; found in History of the Islamic Peoples.

Appropriately enough, this book plate was found in Irish Carved Ornament.

Found in The Crucible of Europe:  The Ninth and Tenth Centureis in European History.

Found in a book called Metal Processing from 1941.

This is a signed Margaret Atwood book plate; found in her novel The Blind Assassin.  The artist is Claire Lerner.

Class Is Held Back

Below is January's collage from the Pistil Books 2012 Collage Calendar.  The artwork is by Sean Carlson, aka Walter Bundtcake.  You can get a lovely hard copy of the 11" x 17" calendar by ordering at the Pistil homepage.

Artist's Statement

This is a only slightly modified photo from the Museum of Anything Can Happen in Amsterdam, where I visited in 2009.  I just added the starfish at the top of the dome.  I was exiting the doorway out of the frame just before the rocket broke through the roof of the interior, so I was not engulfed in flame.  The room was quite peaceful with fish and tireless cars swimming about, the bees eating Jello, that dangerously large robin pecking at the ham sandwich and emitting a low burbling growl when Ken, who was just beside me and actually pushed his way through the door before me had lit the stationary rocket because he was jealous of Barbie's romance with the basketball player.  When Ken saw the basketball player was continually leaping over the book of matches he found his moment.  It was yet another example of human folly at werk.  The class at the top of the stairs was luckily held back.  The instructor explained later she could "feel the bad vibes."

Happy Holidays from Pistil

Here we are in various stages of solemnity:  Amy, Sean, Troy, and Tim - Pistil Staff, December 2011.

Reading Notes
Just a quick list of what I've been reading since the last entry:

From Ink Lake: Canadian Stories Selected by Michael Ondaatje.
A History of Forgetting by Caroline Adderson (novel)
Sitting Practice by Caroline Adderson (novel, did not like or finish)
The Wrong Mother by Sophie Hannah (trashy psychological thriller)
More Granta issues, as always....

Library of Useful Stories

I found a little book recently called The Story of a Piece of Coal:  What It Is, Whence It Comes, and Whither it Goes (1910), by Edward A. Martin, part of the "The Library of Useful Stories" series (not to be confused with The Library of Useless Stories).   A pocket-sized hardback bound in tan cloth and decorated with four illustrations of open books on the front cover, and one on the back, this book is a fine example of the charm of a physical book.  It's darn cute.  And so well-written!

From the homely scuttle of coal at the side of the hearth to the gorgeously verdant vegetation of a forest of mammoth trees, might have appeared a somewhat far cry in the eyes of those who lived some fifty years ago.  But there are few now who do not know what was the origin of the coal which they use so freely, and which in obedience to their demand has been brought up more than a thousand feet from the bowels of the earth; and, although familiarity has in a sense bred contempt for that which a few shillings will always purchase, in all probability a stray thought does  occasionally cross one's mind, giving birth to feelings of a more or less thankful nature that such a store of heat and light was long ago laid up in this earth of ours for our use, when as yet man was not destined to put in an appearance for many, many ages to come. 

Just try reading that aloud.  I'm happy to see a list at the back of the book of the other volumes in The Library of Useful Stories.  I think I will get myself a copy of The Story of Books.

Reading Notes

Once again, I am behind in recording what I've been reading.  I read a novel by Irene Nemirovsky called All Our Worldly Goods  about ordinary upper middle class French people whose lives are turned upside down by war.  The novel is particularly poignant to read given that the author died in Auschwitz, and the book was first published five years after her death.  I read half of A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore, a novel I found to be too damn annoying to finish.  The narrator is a twenty year old college student who gets a job as a nanny for a white couple who have adopted a black baby and rather than plot or interesting characters, the focus seems to be on the unbelievable, precious and quirky voice of this narrator.  I read a book called The Sexual Century:  How Private Passion became a Public Obsession by Tom Hickman.  This was a companion book to a British television show, and is full of great color images and lots of proofreading errors (actually, it probably wasn't proofread) and typos.  An amusing, fast read.  And, as usual, I've been dipping into various past issues of Granta magazine.