The Secret Wall of Wants

We keep a detailed record of all the books our customers put on a "want to buy" list. After taking your name and phone number a note is posted on the wall where it can be easily found upon the book's arrival. You will be notified immediately, whereupon you will drop everything and rush to the store with cash, no credit cards accepted. If we can't find your note the book will be shelved in hopes that another buyer will appear. If it's really a great book, someone will snatch it up. If not, that tells you that your original idea wasn't so hot after all, and you just saved yourself a few bucks. We are here to serve you.

When applying for a job at the store, and here at the outset we must state categorically that there are no vacancies nor do we anticipate that eventuality, please do not send a letter reflecting an absence of knowledge of how we operate as you recite technical abilities of no use to us, however much other commercial enterprises may find them of great service and see in you a potential for exploitation which we don't now nor will we ever, but thanks for asking. Furthermore, phone calls which open with "Hey, you guys hiring?" will be ridiculed and satirized here on the blog in sentences similar to that which you now read. Every treasured and beloved employee began life here as a customer or bf of a bf. So it goes here as it does in much of the cold, cruel world beyond our friendly confines. Somewhere in Shakespeare you can find a diagram for a successful courtship. Dickens, on the other hand, is rife with examples of bad ideas and dumb plans. Thus does literature inform our lives and prepare us for the world. Our best wishes to you as you pursue success or even just a modest form of comfortable survival, which latter, should you prevail, would put you somewhere in the top five percent, historically, so don't knock it.

Manager of Style

Store manager Jessica took a sabbatical last spring and spent time doing research in China. Here she is on the left, just days before losing her favorite Chinese bazaar-bought sunglasses, pirated knockoffs of an Italian design. Sunglasses are of no use in the store. Please don't wear them in and put them down on a shelf, only to forget them while distracted by the store's phenomenal depth and awesomely rich inventory, all chosen by hand and selected to enhance your shopping experience and add dimension to your experience of the world. This is our mission statement, the sunglasses stuff to the contrary notwithstanding. We do have a lost-and-found department, but Jessica didn't put it on her extraordinary map as seen in the preceding post. You have to ask at the desk.

Treasure Map

Who says we don't organize? Look i made a whole map of organized bliss!

IN THE NEWS!! CHICAGO BOOKSTORE EXPOSED AS COLOR-CONSCIOUS. March, 2012.

Ravenswood Used Books, a cramped and crowded shop in this racially divided city, has been discovered shelving books according to color. The most casual inspection of this store's shelves reveals a clear and deliberate effort to organize inventory by each book's color. When interviewed for this report, store manager Jessica admitted that such a formula made it easier for her to remember where titles could be found, although, she said, browsers constantly undid her carefully considered order, leaving behind a mess of clashing hues and titles in no order whatsoever, the store having long ago determined that alphabetizing books is for highly paid librarians and law clerks.

IN THE NEWS!! Bookstore owner discovered to have used company funds for automobile purchase. Chicago, March 2012. Jim Mall, owner of Ravenswood Used Books in Chicago's charming Lincoln Square, has admitted to using sales receipts to buy a Mercedes Benz. Mall, who usually bikes to work from his lakefront condo, was photographed in front of the store as he displayed the Craigslist find to admiring passersby. Questioned as to how the car was financed, Mall responded that he used cash as demanded by all Craigslist posters and that the money had been handed to him in exchange for hundreds or perhaps thousands of books sold to unsuspecting customers in the bookstore over a period of many years. ¶ As of press time no legal action has been taken to retrieve the funds or prosecute the shopkeeper.

Scribbling Scribes

Illuminating Your Margins

"—a collection of complaints monks scribbled in the pages of illuminated manuscripts."

"Illumination": What a a poetic word for scribbling in the margins! Here at the bookstore, we sell only non-illuminated (not to be mistaken for non-luminous) books. The debate rages as to whether reading a book among a community of previous note-takers is charming or rather odious. Maybe it would be more fun if marginalia worked something like Tom Riddle's diary inThe Chamber of Secrets. Wouldn't you like to have a tete-a-tete with some codgy monk? Something like "Oh stop your bellyaching! It's not like you're dying of the Plague! Oh wait..."

Five hundred new fairytales discovered in Germany

Collection of fairytales gathered by historian Franz Xaver von Schönwerth had been locked away in an archive in Regensburg for over 150 years

"A whole new world of magic animals, brave young princes and evil witches has come to light with the discovery of 500 new fairytales, which were locked away in an archive in Regensburg, Germany for over 150 years. The tales are part of a collection of myths, legends and fairytales, gathered by the local historian Franz Xaver von Schönwerth (1810–1886) in the Bavarian region of Oberpfalz at about the same time as the Grimm brothers were collecting the fairytales that have since charmed adults and children around the world."

Read more:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/mar/05/five-hundred-fairytales-discovered-germany#

New Yorker article:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/03/long-lost-fairy-tales.html

Brain on Books

"The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated. Keith Oatley, an emeritus professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto (and a published novelist), has proposed that reading produces a vivid simulation of reality, one that “runs on minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers.” Fiction — with its redolent details, imaginative metaphors and attentive descriptions of people and their actions — offers an especially rich replica. Indeed, in one respect novels go beyond simulating reality to give readers an experience unavailable off the page: the opportunity to enter fully into other people’s thoughts and feelings.

The novel, of course, is an unequaled medium for the exploration of human social and emotional life. And there is evidence that just as the brain responds to depictions of smells and textures and movements as if they were the real thing, so it treats the interactions among fictional characters as something like real-life social encounters."

By ANNIE MURPHY PAUL

Read More:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opinion/sunday/the-neuroscience-of-your-brain-on-fiction.html?pagewanted=all&smid=fb-share

Read Even More:

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/september/austen-reading-fmri-090712.html

A BRUSH WITH DEATH

If you were never born
You'd be getting off without
A life sentence
Or the death penalty.

So never being born is sort of like
Having a great lawyer
And being born is like
Pleading guilty.

These maxims have been tested
In the court of public opinion.

Do you shop here?
I spent your money on a car.

The seller was motivated so
there wasn't time to ask you
for permission.

Please accept my apology.

Why don't you buy my other car?
It's on Craigslist and
I'm motivated.

YOUR CHEATING HEART

It's not the heart that lusts

or breaks

when life goes sour.

The lizard brain selects

while innocent you

gets dragged along

to pick up the tab.

Next time stay home and read.

RACIAL PURITY

One day
a cell divided

and here we are.

SWIFT JUSTICE

A door slammed
A woman cried out
Many people watched and listened
But it was all over too soon
And nothing could be done.

Your tears begin their sad journey
at 98.6 degrees
and cool rapidly.

So much for sorrow and regret,
not to mention
lots of poetry.

Captain's log book, star date 3172012. The north window's latest addition.

What store is listening to today:

Bon Iver a.k.a The Crushed Puppies

Bon Iver at AIR Studios

"Introducing England's fabulous, feminine answer to James Bond"