Off-Leash!

Rob, Stella, and I got out of town on Saturday. We didn't leave the home planet far behind, but we left it and spent the morning and early afternoon in orbit. We landed a few places. Denver has some wonderful and well-ignored mountain parks. We found O'Fallon. It's near Bear Creek and Kittredge. Stella went illegal and off-leash for a small portion of the walk. A dog just has to do that sometimes. She stuck her nose down some holes. She leapt up out of bushes and down to creek beds. Good dog, she also stayed with the pack and didn't bit any mountain biker tires.

We also drove through Morrison, over the Hogbacks and to Golden. We like to visit the city's second largest brewery -- Golden City Brewery. The patio is an oasis. They allow dogs (before 4 p.m.). Stella had a chance to come sit with us.

We also found the local farmer's market. I bought some "imperfect peaches". We trundled back into the car.

It looked like we were headed home until I suggested a detour onto Wadsworth and a visit to Olde Town Arvada. I spotted Grandfather Cooperative Bookstore. Rob and Stella went on in search of a pet store.

Grandfather's isn't Tattered Cover. It's small, three crowded rooms, yet the man behind the desk had to point out the store maps. Hmmm...If your shop is small and organized, do you really need maps? The man behind the desk seemed intent on chatting. He said he thought he knew me. (Well, I don't get around all that often and I haven't lived in the suburbs for more than 25 years.) I didn't want to be rude. I tried for humor. I said, "The gene pool is shallow," and tried to find the literature crumbs back to the south room. He kept talking, expecting a response, until -- thank heaven -- another customer walked in. I hope I was never like that. Was I like that?

Grandfather's inventory does not present itself well. Books are, on the whole, in poor to fair shape. I found a Kerouac collection and Newyorican collection, but both were water damaged. I settled on a volume of Little Journeys to the Homes of American Authors. It's part of a series Putnam undertook near the turn of the 20th century. This volume is from 1896 and has notes on Irving, Emerson, Hawthorne, Prescott, and Lowell. There are a few loose pages, but it is mostly in good shape and I'm going to enjoy it. And I may try to acquire more. (By the way, who is Prescott?)

Speaking of writing and travel, I have three books in the online inventory about writers and travel -- A Long Road Home, In the Footsteps of the WPA Writers by Geoffrey O'Gara, Michael Cunningham's Land's End, and Walks in Gertrude Stein's Paris by Mary Ellen Jordan Haight.

The cat always lands on her feet...

I thought closing Miss Prothero's Books would be simple. I would just walk out and close the door. I didn't know the door I would walk out of would be the door of an airplane flying at 10,000 feet.

As I was falling, I had to remind myself that it took me two years to open the store, two years to make it cozy. I was only taking two months to get it closed and turn it back into the empty shell that it once was.

Who can control a descent? I thought I could.

I began by cherry picking books from the shelf. I told myself that they had to be in fine to very fine condition. They had to be hardback, something I'd read and admired or something I wanted to read and admire. Dilettantes do not make good cherry pickers. They want to read and admire everything. They want to save it all, keep it all -- that paperback about dogs who know when their people are coming home, that law book on Dickens.

Next, I contacted those with store credit. All but one of the creditees responded. At the top of the list was Ron Chidester, an electrician-painter-filmmaker-father-grandfather-genius?-sweetheart-storyteller. When Ron came through the door, I could usually count on an hour in conversation, sometimes more. Because he came in three times to redeem his credit, that was 3-plus hours when I wasn't cherry picking, wasn't deleting books from my inventory file, constructing an advertisement for craigslist or The Post, wasn't deconstructing a bookcase or calling about the credit card machine. (But I don't regret this. Talking to Ron was always fun.)

Telling my book club, writing group, and laughter group was next on my list. I got dumb, numb looks at each meeting. One of the members of the book club suggested they hold the last meeting in the store on August 31. I'm glad I said no.

August 1, the opening night of the Grand Opening Going Out of Business Sale, was the first time I felt as if the buzzards were circling, just waiting for my body to hit the ground hard. We sold most of the bookcases, but not most of the books. Nobody read the signs. Or they read the signs they wanted to read and didn't ask questions. Fiction and poetry was half-off. Sports was $1 per hardback. Folks wanted Hemingway for $1, a book on inner tennis for nothing.

August 1 was the first time I realized that I could no longer control my inventory files. Too much was going out the door too fast. On August 2, I put my online listings on hold.

Then there was the deluge of August 9. It rained and poured that Friday night. It rained and poured through one of my landlord's chimney's and onto my computer equipment. My Powerbook, my printer, my scanner and the keyboard on my iMac were drowned in a sea of ceiling tiles, water and mud. I tried some mouth-to-mouth, but the iMac was the only thing that survived. (What a brave, hearty soul. If Apple ever wants an endorsement, here I am.)

Through all of this, I had much more of the usual -- folks who wanted to give me advice, who wanted to diagnose my failure (duh, I know it was a bad location, but could I afford anywhere else?), and, as always, the daily congregation of drunks. The wall beside Miss P's was just across from the door to Nate's Crown Liquors, one of the cheapest liquor stores in town. Mostly men gathered there to sort out their panhandled change and to make the jaunt for the juice. I called the police, told them to move on, had daily shouting matches, and was sometimes rewarded with a "Yes, ma'am!" and sometimes rewarded with a "F*** you, bitch!"

I was never prepared for the race, poverty, and addiction issues that buzzed outside the store's front door and I don't think I ever will be.

We took down the signs on the 21st, turned the keys in on the 23rd. I am relieved. I've been catching up on accounting and reworking the inventory. (I should be back online by Labor Day.) I've been enjoying the Democratic Convention. I followed Daryl Henline and the Goodnight Bush Choir down the 16th Street Mall, to The Bug, to the Neighborhood Flix Obama Watch party.

I will keep blogging. Because the pressure to promote the store is off, maybe I'll snark, snivel, and complain more. Or maybe I'll finally learn to be positive. I'll talk about other bookstores. (Have you been to Kilgore Books yet? I need to find my way back.) And, goldurnit, I may even learn how to talk about books.

Although I don't think I can keep up with the writing circle, I'm hoping to keep up with the Whodunit Club. I will probably retire Miss P as a business name. (The old girl was too much of an introvert anyway.) I may start operating under the name of Wig's Town Books. Who knows what will happen once I emerge from the cocoon.

Wigtown and Annie's Desk

It's been a pleasant week at Miss Prothero's Books. I learned from my favorite Italian-Scottish customer that the bookstore capitol of Scotland is Wigtown. Being a Wigington, this was mind-tickling news. I'll have to visit the place before I die. I was also visited by my nine-year-old friend Annie and her mother Charlotte. Both mother and daughter are brilliant, beautiful, and bookish. Annie is one of the few children who has sat at my roll top desk, opened the drawers, and found all the materials I left there for children to make things. Annie has made at least two bookmarks and maybe a card. Mostly, she's cut and paste, considered and created.

Unfortunately, it's also been an unprofitable week...as many weeks are at Miss P's. We are coming to the end of our lease on Santa Fe and we're facing some hard decisions. Can we move or should we just go out of business altogether? We've spotted a few for rent signs, but so far the spaces have been too expensive or too small or too invisible to the book browser's eye. One thing I don't want to do is jump from the frying pan into the fire. If we do move, it's got to be pretty close to perfect.

Going out of business seems to be the best option at the moment. Who knows...if I can leave this operation gracefully, I may even get to Wigtown before I die.

Sometimes You Have to Spend Money to...

Spend money. The old adage about spending money to make money strikes me as one of the wackiest con games ever perpetrated on the American businessman and businesswoman. When I first opened Miss Prothero's Books, I believed it. I spent money underwriting a local public radio station, spent money buying what I thought were well-placed ads, spent money on T-shirts and canvas bags with the store logo. When people who have just discovered the store ask me if I advertise, I tell them that I no longer have the budget for it. The money I spent to make money has vanished. It's like those government stimulus checks...lost down a rabbit hole. Maybe our country is in such a mess because people are spending and not investing, spending on themselves and not investing in their community, buying gas at the local 7-Eleven and not taking the time to consider ways out of our current madness.

Reading is an investment for which too few take the time. It is a way to understand yourself and the world. It trains you to look back, forward, and in between. Pick up a book. Forget the latest best seller. There are so many noteworthy reads that you have ignored. Ever read Madame Bovary? How about A Man of the People? How about Snow Country? Want to learn about water and the West and place? Try Robert Michael Pyle's The Thunder Tree.

The Stuff of Stuff

I've been working at Toni's coffee cart to make ends. The contradiction is most apparent there. I have customers who tell me they don't want their credit card receipt. Trying to save a tree, they tell me as they rip open a packet of sugar, pour it into their Styrofoam coffee, and stir it with a disposable plastic stir stick.

I do see it at the bookstore, too. There was one gentleman who told me he wasn't buying any more books. He was "cutting back on things". The next time I saw him he was toting a box from Amazon. Guess what was in the box? Books. Lots of new books. On green living! He was going to hand them out as gifts. Granted, the books were printed on recycled paper. But they were shipped in a new cardboard box on a new plane or truck using several gallons of new fuel.

We are confused birds. I saw graffitti on the sidewalk that seems to sum it all up -- "Consume less. Create more." Never mind that creation is a very material thing, an act of destruction, revision, and consumption.

As a lover of art, it's always bothered me. Why do I need another image on the wall, another story on the shelf, another ring on my finger?

I don't know.

Maybe because it's beautiful. Because it feeds my heart and soul and spirit.

Miss Prothero's Books will be displaying some of that heart and soul and spirit stuff during the month of June. It's jewelry by Kathy Adams and watercolors by Peg Meagher. The opening night reception is June 6 from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Hope you can come. Here are some samples of their beautiful work --

Lake Mc Cononaughy, Nebraska
by Peg Meagher

Pin
by Kathy Adams


Monassas Flowers
by Peg Meagher

Bracelet
by Kathy Adams

The Book Crook

It was not a stellar day for sales yesterday. Miss Prothero's Books had one Internet and one walk-in sale. I added a little more than $15 to the till. Good thing it's laughter yoga day, I told myself. At 4:30, the ladies started arriving...Diana, then Jackie, then Karen. Karen brought hats so we could be particularly silly. We were just settling down to breathing and stretching when the phone rang. I ran to answer, the feathers on my silly hat bouncing down my back.

"You open today?" the caller asked.

"Yes," I said, trying to hide my irritation. The laughter ladies were chortling without me.

"'Til when?"

"We're open until 6 tonight."

"Where you at?"

"1112 Santa Fe Drive -- " Now there were whoops of glee. Whoops of glee without me.

"What's the cross street?"

"11th," I said.

"Okay," the caller said and hung up.

I got back to laughter.

The caller must have gotten in her big white gas guzzling broom as soon as she hung up the phone. She was at the store in five minutes after her call hauling two Walmart bags of mass market paperbacks through the door.

"Hi," I said. "We're in the middle of a laughter yoga session."

"Wanted to know if you bought books," she said.

Something told me to just say no. Then something told me not to be impolite.

"I can take a look," I said. I don't know why. Mass market means mass produced, means cheap, means too damned many and cheap. The most I've ever made on a modern mass market is a little less than a dollar. Most of them end up in my twenty-five cent pile near the front door.

"What's laughter got to do with books?" my visitor asked. She did not ask in a friendly or curious way. My visitor preferred serious books, I told myself.

I pulled out nineteen volumes that I thought might appeal to the whodunit club or maybe the odd science fiction fan. There was nothing there that I wanted to read myself. A dime a piece, I told myself. I offered my visitor three bucks.

"Put those books back!" My visitor shouted. "You're the biggest crook I've ever met."

I let her get to me. I felt greedy. As if I'd stolen the books from her. As if I wanted to steal the books from her.

My visitor waved her hand at the laughter ladies. "Did you see that?" she said. "She offered me three dollars for nineteen of my books!"

There were more declarations of my evil, shysterly ways. My back was beginning to ache from being so crooked.

My visitor finally swooped out carrying her two Walmart bags by the neck as if they were cats she was going to kill for dinner.

Good thing it was laughter yoga day. The ladies and I put on our silly hats. We giggled and chortled and guffawed all of the negative energy out of the room.

Good thing the laughter ladies left their silly hats!

About the Presence of God

There is a crazy lady in Miss Prothero's Books. I know because she's been in before. The last time she was here she wanted books about boyfriends. The one she had disappeared, and I don't mean he skipped town. He disappeared into a beam of light. Or so she said. After dismissing all my boyfriend books, she wondered...did if I had any books on voodoo? I did. She sat looking at the sole title for a very long time. She turned a page and pushed up her black frame glasses. She turned a page and pulled them back down. Her lips moved from time, but I didn't know if she was reading or responding to some inner voice.

Today she asked for books on spirituality. I pointed to south toward the religion section. When she found the correct shelves, she turned back and asked, "But do you have any books on the presence of God?"

"I imagine all of those in front of you are about the presence of God," I said waving her on to toward the spines of the books.

"And there may be a few in there about the absence..." I mumbled as I retreated to my office.

The crazy lady did not find what she was looking for.

She is now moving about the store, picking books up and putting them back in their place. (I hope.) She drops Glamorama by Brett Easton Ellis, then apologizes. She moves slowly from section to section, pushing her black frame glasses up the bridge of her nose as she shuffles from Mystery and Suspense to Gothic and Horror. She stops for a long time in Self-Help, stands transfixed by a book about auras.

She's killing time, I know. Like all of us. Waiting for God, I suppose. Or the presence of God. Whichever comes first.

The ship is sinking...want to hop on board?

It's been a rough day at Miss Prothero's Books. I made one $3 dollar sale before open hours and gave away one book to Sweden. (Why did I let myself get sucked into that?) Don't they have enough of our books? I've spent two hours following up on job leads and responding to email. It's 1st Friday in the Art District, and I will be out in the cold again with no readings planned, no art on the wall. Plus I talked to my landlord about getting out of my lease early. I can get out, I guess, if I can find someone else to rent the space.

I have been talking to The Laughing Bean about combining operations. If I do find my way out of this space, maybe I'll be moving down to The Bean. I also talked to two people about turning Miss P's into a collective of like-minded literatis and bookies. This is the idea that appeals to me most. If you're a literati or a bookie, if you're out there and you're reading this, want to hop on board? Well, maybe I don't want you to hop on board. Maybe the bunch of us can lash together enough pieces to make a new ship or, at least, a better raft.

I'd Rather Be Reading

Yesterday was a lovely day, lots of productive pottering. I moved books, sometimes to the buck bin, sometimes off the shelf. I had a late visitor who said he'd heard Miss Prothero's Books was a happening place. A joke, I thought, but the fellow was serious and a serious book buyer. I should have asked him if he had cousins or twins, any like-minded, deep-pocketed friends.

Today was a little ugly. The wind was awful. My history sandwich board went down twice. One of the West High School students came in babbling on his cell phone, dancing like he needed to go to the bathroom. He danced from front door to "Animals", front desk to "Poetry", never pausing long enough to tell me what he needed.

"I don't want to listen to your conversation!" I grumbled.

The boy apologized and danced out the door.

Then I had to talk to Qwest about my long distance, First Data about my credit card machine lease. Yuck. Not much was resolved. Some businesses just seem to be in the business of putting you out of business.

I did have a nice conversation with a young man from Sweden. He was surprised that America had Neo-Nazis, that Colorado had been a hotbed of KKK activity. He asked me if I thought the Democrats would win. I think he liked Obama. He said he would be back.

Knowing my luck, he'll probably bring Swedish kroners with him.

Oh, well. I have a nice copy of Suite Francaise at the front desk. I think I'll crack it open.

Send Lawyers, Guns, and Money

It's an understatement to say business is bad. Business is horrid. Business has little green teeth. It has blood shot eyes and wants to bit me on the ankle. Even Internet orders have slowed. No, I don't want to sell coffee. It's too big of an investment. And I'm not sure having event after event is the answer. Event goers aren't always readers. They are the cousin of the author, the aunt of the painter, the ex-husband of the ex-photographer. They come and go and don't come back.

I will be exploring different ways of being in the next few weeks. New hours are at the top of the list. A different business structure is next. (Anybody want to be a partner?) A new location is somewhere on that list, too. So is a part-time job. (Anybody want to hire a hardworking dilettante who can be smarter than the average bear?)

Okay, I'm going to stop whining.

If you've read this post and want a discount on books, I'll give you 50% off all the cookbooks you can carry. This offer is good until Friday.

Curious Signs and Wonders

The TV, the newspapers have taken up the drum again. Americans don't read or when they do, they don't read much. As I make my daily commute (a 30 minute walk from Capitol Hill to La Alma), I look at the curious signs all about me and wonder if the opposite isn't true. Do we read too much, get bombarded with too much information, and -- to paraphrase Gertrude Stein -- lose our sense, our place in the world? Maybe we've given up reading for data mining. Maybe we only see what we think we need to see, the nuggets of gold that will quicken the journey. But the journey to where? If we don't read, don't understand context, the journey is nothing but disaster.

Take this sign at 13th and Corona.



A data miner might see trouble ahead and make a quick turn left. A reader might consider context, might understand that the detour sign is misplaced punctuation and make the only possible decision -- a turn to the right.

Or this sign towed daily through the morning commute skies --


A data miner might not see the plane towing the sign, might interpret the yellow as some sort of distress signal, a very large piece of trash, nothing to stop for, not for me, not in my backyard. A reader, on the other hand, would be curious, interested in the whole sentence -- the plane, the noise, the fact that the advertisement is upside down.

What would a data miner make of this?


Old beer? Well, I'm not stopping in there!

A reader would know that there's an "F" missing here, but a data miner might get confused.


Century Lots? Is that anything like Big Lots? Can I get anything cheap there?

What about this stencil at 12th and Bannock? Would a data miner believe that fish are waste?


A reader would understand context -- the drain beneath the stencil feeds the creek two blocks away, that fish swim in the creek, that the creek is fresh water, that waste could kill the fish or turn them unnaturally green.

And then there's the clock at 11th and Speer.


A data miner might look once and believe it to be broken, the hands all wrong. A reader might see the same clock day after day and realize that the face is not quite right, the hands are where they should be, and, yes, the time is pretty darn accurate. 11:16. Almost time for lunch.

Beer, Books, and Teague Bohlen

Okay, I'll finally admit it. Miss Prothero's Books is located near a liquor store, not a nice, genteel middle class liquor store where maiden aunts go to buy sherry and fruitcake brandy and hep young couples go to debate the merits of different microbrews.

It's a place that loads up on cheap malt liquor and rot-gut vodka, a place where the down and out go to get down and out. It's the block's bitter old uncle, the barrio's black hole. People who get sucked in don't come back. When they do come back, they've mutated beyond hope.

But what can I say. The owner of the store is just trying to survive, trying to make a buck. Who doesn't stand on someone's back on the way to the top of the pile?

Whose back am I standing on?

I had a drunk arrested the other day. I know it's not going to help him. It probably won't help my business, either. He'll be back. When he comes back, he'll sit on the wall next to my store, a big man with a big bottle of Cobra. I'll ask him to leave. He'll flutter his hand at me. I'll threaten to call the police. He'll flutter his hand at me and say, "Go ahead." Add to this recipe the lard of race and class, and I'm left with a terrible tasting piece of the pie.

How do I stand against this overwhelming tide without standing on someone's back?

Books are a consolation of sorts. There's nothing like a good story to put it all into perspective. About a week ago, I finished reading Teague Bohlen's The Pull of the Earth. It's a book about a father and son, two sisters, an angry young man who turns helpless old drunk. It's about family and secrets, murder and second chances, the poisoned mud upon which we build our lives. It's also about standing against the pull of the past and the weight of the world.

Bohlen's book is a finalist for a Colorado Book Award. He and Bob Cooperman will be reading at Miss P's in September. I'm excited. We'll talk about the reading more in another post.

I'm Melting! Melting!

Call me a weather whiner, a global weirding wacko. I'm getting tired of the extremes, tired of the clear blue skies, tired of the heat, tired of sticking to the back of my chair and the top of the counter.

The trees that the development district planted along Santa Fe Drive are getting tire, too. I think I can hear them sizzling in their concrete stands. I've tried to help with buckets of water, but the tree to the right of Miss Prothero's Books has finally refused and lost all its leaves. It is carefully and quietly committing suicide.

I wish I could make it rain. For the last hour, I've been flipping through two books about humanity and its weather. One is Steve Thayer's The Weatherman, a thriller about a killer whose moods seem to change with the seasons. The other book is non-fiction -- Clark C. Spence's The Rainmakers, American "Pluviculture" to World War II. Spence traces rainmaking schemes all the way up to the first successful cloud seeding experiment in 1946. There's a chapter on rain by convection, rain by concussion, and rain by stink.

I think maybe I'll just shake my fist at the sky.

Ooops! Was that thunder I heard?

The Evil Nan Does Lives Long After Her

I had a call from a radio reporter this morning. When he brought up the subject of Harry Potter, I thought he wanted to know about Harry Perez, the bookstore's July 21 collaboration with The Laughing Bean Cafe. How wrong could I be? He reminded me of The Denver Post interview I did a few weeks ago. He wanted me to re-hash the reasons why I wasn't carrying Book 7.

Because I'm a used bookstore, I growled.

What was my stand on Harry Potter? Did I know of any other small bookstores that might not be carrying the book?

I wish you could've seen the smoke that came from my ears. I have no stand on new books. I do order them for my in-house book clubs.

As for the opinions of other small dealers, I told the radio reporter to do his own legwork.

If you're looking for Harry Potter on Saturday morning, I may have one copy of book 7. You'll have to come to Harry Perez and the Deathly Jello to get it.

But there are also many other good books in the sea.

If you're looking for witches and wizards, I do have some Tolkien. If you need a good Bildungsroman, I have Esperanza Rising, Motherless Brooklyn, and The Education of Little Tree. You want to follow the journey of a hero? Miss Prothero's has some interesting books by Joseph Campbell. We have Beowulf and Ulysses. What about the journey of the anti-hero? We've got Grendel and Charles Johnson's Dreamer.

Mind Your P's, Q's, and Newspaper Reporters

My favorite philosopher is Winnie-the-Pooh. If I were to paraphrase Pooh, last Friday was oh-bother sort of day. My loyal husband was out front trying to steam clean the walks. Water hoses and cords were snaking through the store. I had just made it up the rickety ladder in order to replace a spotlight that seems to burn out every two weeks. And then the phone rang.

Should I flounder down the rickety ladder, skip over the cords and hoses and answer? I made the decision that I would, and I'm still a little sorry. It was a newspaper reporter from the Denver Newspaper Agency. Was I going to carry the newest Harry Potter? Well, no, I said, staring at the spotlight that I'd carried down the ladder with me. Well, why, the young man wanted to know. Because I'm a used bookstore, I said, and it's not really in the budget.

I didn't say -- because the market is glutted with Harry Potter, because I'd rather carry books that you newspaper reporters overlook, because maybe the Harry Potter phenomenon isn't all that it's cracked up to be.

I hung up the phone and started back up the ladder.

Today, I open the paper to see that Miss Prothero's is choosing not to carry Potter because it's just too durn expensive. Poor little independent bookseller me.

Heck, it wasn't really a conscious choice! But then if I'm going to be talking to newspaper reporters, I'd better be a little more conscious about what I'm saying.

Done by Hope

Being a used and rare book dealer has its drawbacks. The newer book doesn't walk through the door all that often. When it does, it's usually gone before you get a chance to open it.

The book you want to read is usually the book someone else wants to buy. And, heck, you're trying to stay in business, so you always let that someone take it out of your hands and buy it. I've had that happen with The Devil in the White City, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

I guess I shouldn't read in public. Forget about sitting at the front desk with an open book in my hand.

I've had several copies of The Devil in the White City. I've read it piecemeal...which is a very unsatisfying way to read a book.

I did the smart thing with The Road. I checked it out of the library. It's sitting quietly on the stand next to the couch waiting for me to finish it. If I weren't so afraid of selling a book that's not mine, I would bring it to the bookstore and finish it here.

I love Cormac McCarthy. Okay, he can be dark, horrifying, and unrelentingly mean to his own characters. Yet every time I open one of his books, my disbelief is suspended, my chin silently drops, and I read on in open-mouthed amazement.

The Road is no exception.

What happened to put this man and this boy on such a desolate road, what happened to the woman who gave birth to this boy are -- for me -- only niggling questions. My only concern is how the man and the boy stay good in such an bad world. As I turn each page, I chant this mantra --

Please let them stay good, Mr. McCarthy, please let them stay good.

Here's a question -- What would you do at the end of the world? Forget Jesus. Forget Buddha. Forget Muhammad. What would you do?

My husband tells me I don't even need to think about it. If there were terrorist incident or a nuclear war, he says, Denver would get gold embossed invitations. I don't tell him that there are other forms of apocalypse...the ones where tsunamis clobber the coasts and the best place to be is in the Mile-Hi City or somewhere near Colorado Springs.

The truth of it is...I don't even want to think about it. If the world comes to an end, please don't let me survive.

The solution is...I need to be good here and now.

The quote of the day on today's sandwich board was "Everything that is done in the world is done by hope."

Let me proceed with hope, Mr. McCarthy, let me proceed with hope.

Books as a Source of Alternative Energy

I have a friend with a touch of bibliomania. I've been making noises about going over to her house and helping her find a cure. I finally followed up on the threats last Monday and...Well, I'm no doctor. I can't cure my friend or society's consumptive ills. I did walk away with four boxes of lovely books, books that I'm glad my friend saved from the crusher, the shredder, and the landfill. I also walked away with some resolutions. I will start saying no to the mass market paperback, no to the book that is not well-made, well-written or well-designed. I'm also going to spend more time on promoting literacy. A literate person is less likely to fall prey to mass market appeals. I'll also be working on ways to recycle old books. I've been talking with Nancy Missbach of Tangerine Book Arts about an altered books project. We may well have an altered books exhibit ready by October. Keep your fingers crossed.

-NW

You can't judge a book by its cover, but sometimes it's a smart idea...

About a month ago, someone stuck a DVD and booklet into Miss Prothero's mailbox. The cover was sensationalistic, a roll of money in the cross hairs, a pool of blood, a graveyard. Psychiatry, death, and documentary were all part of the title. I put the package in the recycle.

Last week, the man behind the DVD came to the bookstore. He was an honest, hard-working sort. There was a little bit of plaster dust on his jeans. He wanted to know if I'd watched the DVD. I told him no. He wanted to know why not. I wasn't honest. I said someone got to it before I did.

Then the man explained himself. He had a son, a beautiful ball of energy, who had been diagnosed with ADD.

"They have him on ritalin," he said. "They don't think they can let me see him because they're afraid I won't let him take the stuff."

"My boy's life is ruined," he said. "Just because the courts believe the psychiatrist."

The man and I talked about how quick the world was to diagnose the worst, how pigeon-holed people too fast. We talked about drug companies, the latest anti-depressants and sexiest sleep-aids. We talked about health insurance and medicare and junk food and nutrition and taking control of your life.

The man gave me a new copy of the DVD and booklet. I said I'd put it on the shelf, but I didn't promise to read it or watch it.

Guilt did get the best of me. I opened the booklet, but couldn't get very far. This was not a documentary work. It was a systematic attempt to shape my views, my opinions, my behaviors. It was propaganda, hokum, brainwash, ritalin for the soul.

If the man comes back, maybe we can have another conversation. Something about reading between the lines. Isn't that what every good bookseller should do? Help people learn to read between the lines? Or should a bookseller just stand back and let people believe what they want to believe?

Miss P's Home for Wayward Books

Miss Prothero's Books had two "donations" on Wednesday. The first I didn't mind all that much. It arrived in the sunny part of the day when I had just opened the store and was out sweeping. A gray-haired lady in a nondescript Ford slowed (which can be a danger on Santa Fe Drive). She looked up at the sign above the door and pulled into the parking lane by the store.

"Are you the book lady?" she said as she got out of the car. Her tone was clandestine, conspiratorial. What sort of illegitimate creature did she want to get rid of fast? They were cookbooks. A few classics. James Beard, Julia Child, Diana Kennedy. Definitely not illegitimate. And okay, they were in good condition. I was glad to have them.

The second "donation" appeared just after the rain. The young man making the delivery stood in the doorway, shifting from foot to foot, his poncho dripping rain on the free newspapers and the mass market paperbacks in the 50 cent file.

"I've been in here before..." he started.

Yes, he had. He tried to make his rent money one Saturday by selling books that had been folded, spindled and mutilated.

This time he just wanted to give them away. Going back to Austin, he told me. Denver's too big, he said, too violent. And he was taking the bus, so he couldn't take everything with him. He just wanted to give the books away to someone who "might appreciate" them.

What could I say?

The young man made three trips -- house to store, house to store, house to store. And each stack of books he brought was more rain damaged than the next.

Why did I think I could rescue any of them?

This is the dilemma. How can I sell books when too many are intent on folding, spindling, rain-soaking, and giving them away? Has the written word become that cheap?