I have some overdue organising to do at the moment...piles of books to be reconfigurated....so I figure I may as well have the doors open for all you Sunday shoppers and folk visiting this fair town!!
Hours 10 am till, shall we say? 2.30pm...I shall commit to that, though I may well be there longer...
I am currently reading a random collection of early Horror..it includes many of the lesser known (but still worthy) pieces by the usual suspects, the Up-All-Night-Got-Bills-to-Pay Authors such as Balzac, Poe, Bierce and includes Thomas Hardy's "The Three Strangers" ..which is a brilliant story, one that would make an excellent Western, but seems to be the predictable go to choice for people overseeing these collections...
....however ..while musing on the difficult career of Hardy I was reminded of this funny anecdote from the research of Claire Tomalin in her Hardy biography, "A Time Torn Man."
"Hardy was a young man. He was living in Surbiton, one of the London suburbs near Kingston upon Thames at the time. He had just married Emma Gifford and they moved into a house called St Davids Villa in Hook Road. He was working as an architect for a firm in London and hadn't become famous as a writer. Hardy was in the Strand and popped into a coffee shop for a cup of tea and a bite to eat.
Charles Dickens was sitting there.
He was immediately recognisable to Thomas Hardy as he would have been to anybody. Hardy was about to go over and introduce himself and say hello but Dickens called over a waiter and began arguing about his bill. Dickens was ever concerned about the money. Hardy hesitated and the moment passed. The two greatest novelists of the Victorian period nearly met."
People who actually buy secondhand books and records, in actual Secondhand Bookstores, with any sort of regularity, want a browsing experience, they want to scour the shelves until something pops out.
This is what I like to think we provide here at Little Red.
Of course that doesn't mean you shouldn't ask for that particular book that triggered your shadow crossing our doorway (as long as it's not Orwells "1984"; or "Dune" ..please do not ask me for them ..you won't be the first person that week or even that day...).
We enjoy helping people find obscure books. I personally love a challenge and will happily hunt around online looking for a title with only the barest of clues...but really that should just be the start of the adventure.
We are a physical shop, not a list...though I imagine one day we will be only online ..a virtual list floating around the interweb... hmmm...I'm not entirely sure how I feel about that ..it has to be said there are many, many (many) advantages to being online ..but for now, lets just enjoy the chaotic sense of discovery that is an old-fashioned Secondhand Bookstore!!
A few kindly people have noted that we did not open this Sunday, which, I have to say, it's nice to be missed.
The plan was to open..unfortunately exactly halfway through my cycling commute my beloved Airnimal suffered a catastrophic, but not entirely unexpected, flat tyre.
Due to a series of unfortunate coincidences my list of emergency contacts was of no particular or timely help, and I decided, it being such a nice day, that in fact the hour and a half walk to town was not the worst fate to befall a soul on a mellow Sunday.
All have this has reminded me, it is in fact the end of Summer, and time to bring back Autumn/Winter hours. At this point that simply means no more Sundays till the end of the year. I imagine I shall revive them in time for Christmas shopping.
Its been fun, but now is the time to rest and recuperate, and maybe fluff around in the garden before Winter descends...
Our catalogue system is my brain...it really is, for all those highly sceptical folk who think I have said we do not have a book in stock just a little too quickly for their liking.
I presume they think I have said book and simply do not wish to sell it..a fair assumption given my hoarding tendencies...but please be assured..I am in fact here to sell books.
As for the memory "thing"....It's the odd and imperfect superpower of all true Second Hand Book Dealers..that, and in an inspired moment, remembering that book you purchased that one time you came to the Bay 6 years ago...
The interesting thing is I am able to recall books and authors we definitely do not have in stock quicker than those that we possibly do.....its a little like thinking about your pantry...you know there are tinned tomatoes, pasta sauce, and a very old tinned beetroot and condensed milk
...and, thinking hard, there probably is a tin of coconut milk, and possibly anchovies...but tinned banana flowers?...I know for a fact there aren't any..(actually..there is. but you get the idea...)
As most people can understand..we have 40,000 books in store..keeping an up to date catalogue is simply not practical...it would require either a mind and store adaptable to technology...or a person able to type with more than 2 fingers.
I belong to neither blessed group.
I belong to the crotchety old world of second hand book sellers..like something out of a Dickens novel..an anomaly in this modern age I'm afraid...
And, of course I have been wrong (she blushes charmingly), but on average, not enough for me to query the system...
People often ask me my favorite author...which is an impossible question ..but I get the intent..so my answer is always "Stephen King …and Thomas Hardy"...
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but I do wonder, is there a connection between these two wordsmiths?
Other than my questionably low brow and Gothic tastes?
Surely! and yes!...King loves to read and loves to talk, and so we have this random gem I found on the internet..
"Thomas Hardy...the only book of his I read (Jude) was so sad I not only never went back to it, but quit reading entirely for a while - but then I was 17"
Well, I shall take that as a compliment to my dear Mr. Hardy.
I feel a little less sure that Hardy would have been much effected by Stephen King's writing should it have suddenly appeared on his desk at Max Gate (via the time machine, of course) ..but still, to my mind they are complementary additions to the well rounded book shelf...
This correspondence between RL Stevenson and Henry James is amusing ..James isn't wrong, but misses the point of reading a Hardy. As an aside, I wonder how James would feel about the Netflix take on his "The Turn of the Screw"?...anyway, I suspect modern literary critics are missing the joy of reading King for pretty much the same reasons...
https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1330&context=cq
Just to wrap up this odd flow of conciousnes....to all the customers who have left this shop with an unexpected Stephen King recommendation from yours truly...my apologies ..but trust me he's a great writer, in a much maligned genre, one which both Hardy and James would probably find themselves dabbling in were they born in this somewhat flawed, but nonetheless exciting modern age.
