Travel Section on the Move!

Don't panic! The travel-related sections - travel narratives, books about ships/air travel/cars/trains, polar adventures - moved upstairs to the Gold Room, and Law, Economics, and Business are now in the downstairs hall. Just trying to find your favoritest spots for things you like.

Along with Moonlighter Karen, we are excited to introduce to you our new Summer Ghost Michael! He'll be in during late afternoons, like the sun finally is, for the next week or so, then on full time Tuesday through Saturday.

Wait'll you meet them both. We are so thrilled to have them!

Today marked the debut of our new Moonlighter, Karen. She will be helping during the transition period here at the beginning of our busiest season and on occasion, we hope, for a long time to come - meet her once and you'll see why we are so delighted to have her with us!

More new games in today! Be sure to check the fiction section, too, since Ali has been doing truly herculean work in there to try to add some 150 titles to our... 10,000 books in general fiction!

Colson Whitehead (who will be reading at Prairie Lights Bookstore tonight at 7), Munro, Ariyoshi, DeLillo, Celine, Kincaid, Lively, Pynchon, Murakami, Coetzee, and - whoops, no, we don't have The Goldfinch anymore. See why you should come early and often?

Space for Readings Project Day 2: E and B moved two bookcases, opening up space for at least five more seats. I'll have to figure out the next step tonight, but meanwhile...

TWO BOOKCASES FOR SALE. 7" deep; 32-36" wide; one 7' high, one 6'; shelves of a height appropriate for smaller (mass market) paperbacks; pine; slightly worn but smooth, medium brown stain, good for at least another 60 years of being home to books. $150 each.

(There will also be other bookcases coming up for sale as we rearrange.)

Also, 1921 set of Rorschach cards. Yes, really.

Today's project: Make space for readings this summer. Moved a section, started on another... oops, I bought some Eisner, Pekar, Sfar, Gaiman, Frank Miller, Kubert, now where am I going to put these?

AND HARDCOVER EDWARD GOREY. The sky may be holding back rain, but the awesome books are pouring in. Get dibs! Come now!

Quiet day. The store greeters take a break in the east window while a nearby human worker sorts books on classical music and jazz.

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....

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.

Dozens of fresh art books, mostly in architecture, photography, and individual artists; half a shelf of Hunter S. Thompson (Journalism is in the red room upstairs); "The Ocean at the End of the Lane" by Neil Gaiman; Hoberman spheres, wooden letter blocks, terrariums, and Sylvia Plath and Noam Chomsky finger puppets. And that was before 2pm.

So we had to rearrange United States History and Military History to fit in the new arrivals from last week, and now it looks like we have hit a fiction jackpot, some interesting Economics, and a shelf or two of early Christian theology (not just Augustine, but Tertullian and Origen and Gregory of Nyssa and more). And there are new plush dinosaurs. So we're pretty happy, but we'd be even happier to share our toys. Come on in!

The staff banded together and gave Nialle a week off.

THANK YOU, STAFF.

...Now that Nialle's back, though, it's time to play "How much Shakespeare criticism and Latin can we cram into the bookstore while adding another shelf to Buddhism?" Next week, we'll have some new toys, including a Tesla doll and fearsomely cute plush Angora rabbits as well as awesome new educational games and toys for the 2-5 age group. And then we'll get cracking on expanding the U.S. history department, though there will doubtless be other surprises as the weather warms and friends with fascinating books to sell escape their winter lodgings. Be the first to see what they bring - come in, come in!