You can click the picture below, and you will discover a beautiful, heartbreaking short story about a bookseller in comic form. Translated from Croatian, I believe, into English. If you receive a warning question asking if you are old enough to view the page, don’t worry. Nothing offensive there.
We sell a mixture of new and used books here. When people bring us hardcover thrillers and romances for store credit we have to tell them that no one will probably ever want them. Most hardcover thrillers and romance, except for a very select few, are worse than worthless since it can actually require money to dispose of them.
People often read those books in bed, so we have been told, and it becomes taxing to hold those books up while reclining, unlike a small mass market paperback. Or they read them while traveling, and don’t want the extra weight. Many thriller/suspense novels are time sensitive (Anyone want to read a cold war thriller from the early eighties? Probably not.) and like a new car, lose value the instant you take them off the lot.
We make sure to have a good selection of genre paperbacks, and just a few hardcovers for collectors at a very reasonable price.
There is always the great Graham Greene, who sometimes wrote thrillers. Those hardcovers are welcome. Some Ian Flemming hardcovers are valuable.
What sparked this post? This collection of photos where artists are using books in ways they were not originally intended. Many people cringe at the idea of destroying literature. But there are a lot of unloved books out there. Sometimes, because they are just too heavy. It appears they make fine support walls for forts though. Link
We have recently acquired a bunch of used manga titles. They look new, yet are half the price.
El cartel ganador del concurso convocado con motivo del XIII Salón del Manga es obra de Fernando Casaus Mur.
Poe Backside, originally uploaded by FishStikks aka babbetto.
Oops. Totally forgot to mention that yesterday was Edgar Allen Poe’s birthday.
You can read Neil Gaiman’s introduction to Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe here:
And so, for my thirteenth birthday, I asked for and received a copy of the Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. I have no idea whether Poe is an author appropriate for thirteen-year-old boys. But I still remember the deliciousness of the final bodily death of M. Valdemar, as he came out of his trance; I remember the thrill I took the first time I read “The Masque of the Red Death”, and Prospero’s doomed attempt to continue the party, and that final, perfect sentence; I remember the tingle of delighted horror that prickled the back of my neck when I encountered the first words of “The Telltale Heart”, as the narrator assures us that he is not mad, and I knew that he was lying; I remember wondering — as I still wonder — what insult Fortunato gave to Monstressor that demanded that damp journey through the catacombs, in search a cask of Amontillado…
The TechCrunch Guide To The Inauguration
Whether you are headed to Washington for the Obama Inauguration or simply want to follow along online, there is no shortage of sites and applications dedicated to the national party on Tuesday, January 20. Link
We have no plans to stock this one:
A Stephen King fan has published an 80-page version of the book which novelist Jack Torrance obsessively writes during King’s The Shining, where his descent into madness is revealed when his wife discovers that his work consists of just one phrase, endlessly repeated.
Torrance, played by Jack Nicholson in terrifying form in Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film, is a frustrated writer who goes with his wife and son to spend the winter in the isolated Overlook Hotel in an attempt to get the novel he has always wanted to write started. But the hotel’s grisly past and unquiet ghosts have their way with him, and his wife Wendy eventually finds that the manuscript he has been working on actually only contains the phrase “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”, typed over and over again.
Now New York artist Phil Buehler, who describes himself as “a big fan of Stanley Kubrick and Stephen King”, has self-published a book credited to Torrance, repeating the phrase throughout but formatting each page differently, using the words to create different shapes from zigzags to spirals.
We all had a good laugh about this Shining trailer edited as if Nora Roberts penned it rather than Stephen King:
I don’t know anything more about this photo, other than what the photographer says about it, “A creative bookstore advertisement in Linz, Austria.” You can click the photo to take a look at more of Jason’s very cool travel photography.
Thanks to the presurfer we discovered NamelessLetter which is a:
collaborative art project where people from all horizons leave personalized bookmarks in books with the goal of seeing other readers discover them.All kinds of bookmarks are accepted (creativity is the limit).
They can be left in different places such as libraries, bookstores, etc.
We, of course, support these kinds of activities here. Looks like this site is just getting started.
We sell a mixture of new and used books. We love getting new books in, but new ones lack the opportunity of discovering sometimes surprising found art. We have discovered all sorts of stuff, some worthy of those popular books by Davy Rothbart: Found: The Best Lost, Tossed, and Forgotten Items from Around the World, and its sequel, More of the Best, Lost, Tossed and Forgotten Items from Around the World.
Subscribe in a reader