So. Many. Art. Books.

Before we start adding these two new collections, we already have: 75 books on technique; 90 on architecture; 198 history and criticism; 70 photography; 211 individual artists; 97 museum exhibit catalogues; 52 fashion and design.

Who's in there? Everyone from Chagall to Alvarez Munoz, Wyeth to Daumier, the Etruscans to Seymour Lipton, Sir Kenneth Clark to Dave Hickey, Boerner catalogues to University of Iowa Museum of Art collections, books on photography lighting and on life drawing and on mosaic tiling and on jewelry making, and stuff about 50's industrial motifs and art quilts and the history of costume, and how about Japanese brush painting and Celtic artifacts and street art and naive movements? Oh, and there's at least one book on Marvin Cone and a big full-color Toulouse-Lautrec one that just came in....

Native American Studies: now eight shelves full of everything from "Book of the Hopi" and Peter Matthiesen's "In the Spirit of Crazy Horse" to recent scholarly releases from University of Nebraska press (including a grammar of Creek, which you should buy so that I can quit being tempted, please).

The section is in the Blue Room, upstairs. For lack of space, we did move a lot of mythology titles out to the Myth & Folklore section by the couch, and you might also want to check U.S. History - West (Red Room) for new arrivals there....

Mystery and Thriller (True Crime is at the end of the section, and Horror is around the corner).
Number of books: 1728.
Average price: $5.
 

We're in for a rainy week, so find something adventurous, clever, or full of plot twists to take you away....

Come in, we're open! Really!

So a lot of people apparently think the Haunted is closed. As in, for good. It's true, we've not worked as fast as we could have to get signs for our new location at 219 N Gilbert St (a block east and around the corner from the old place if you haven't been in yet!), and maybe we haven't advertised enough.

The thing is, it's getting to be kind of an issue - we need people to find us and our better-than-ever selection if we're going to be able to afford the dangerously awesome books people are offering us.

So we have three questions:

1. If you were going to advertise a new business location but had a fairly small budget, where would you advertise?

2. What can we do to make the new location a place you'd want to be - whether buying or writing or reading or relaxing?

3. If you hear someone saying we're closed, could you please correct them?

Thanks!

Happy National Poetry Month!

 Celebrating National Poetry Month by adding another hundred titles to our poetry section, bringing the total selections to nearly 1100. Average price: $6.

Not counting the signed, limited, or otherwise rare editions, which are in the glass cases around the corner. And we have some wild ones right now. You should take a look.

Number of plays in the northwest room: 1059
Average price: $2.95

DISCUSSION QUESTION:

So one of us just finished reading "Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore," which is both fun and full of a hope we can really appreciate - that books will continue to have a place in society, alongside technology, each offering people a chance to be creative and to grow. There is, however, an ongoing question around here, inspired by the representation of booksellers throughout modern fiction, and we'd like your answer:

What do you think it would really be like to work in an independent bookshop? (People who have done so, no spoilers.)

Newest book from Zen poet Kyugen, now available!

Also, we now know why it's so tiring to shelve the general fiction section. IT HAS 10,000 BOOKS IN IT. Think about that - ten thousand carefully selected, neatly cleaned, alphabetized works of world fiction, in or translated into English, average price $6.50.

And that's just one section.

HELP WE ARE TRAPPED BEHIND PILES OF AWESOME FRESHLY CLEANED AND PRICED POETRY as well as literature, ancient history, speculative fiction, young adult novels, World War II history, nature and ecology, literary criticism including both major annotations of Finnegan's Wake....

MORE in Anthropology (green room), Biography (gold room - lots of 19th century authors, but also Kerouac and the Leakeys and more), Native American Studies (blue room), and Poetry (on your right as you come through the front door).

And yes, we have several books by Peter Matthiesen, both fiction and nonfiction.

Also, for the incipient philosophical jokester in your life, chicken-and-egg matrushkas (safe for thinkers age 6mo+)

Henry Miller, Jose Saramago, Raymond Queneau, P. D. James, A. S. Byatt, a shelf and a half more in Women's Studies, another shelf of classic Christian theology, stacks of books about NASA missions and the Mars projects.

Don't forget that we also have half a case packed with gardening books, with emphasis on the environmentally-friendly and the food-as-well-as-beauty-producing (and around the corner, agriculture, now with books on urban farming). Look in the Green Room at the top of the stairs.

Also, philosophy readers, you might want dibs on some of the stuff I just shelved in the Blue Room.