Michael Eizen, posted 22 April 2011 ¶ have encountered similar mindless pricing and copy-cat pricing at Abe, but there owing to human not machinic idiocy… ¶ oh, and by the way, a smart blog here.

Gus Blaisdell (1935-2003) ; I remember him as a bookseller, and author of impenetrable but important (for me) essay in Lewis Baltz's great Park City (1980).

includes embedded video…

in A Pound of Paper: Confessions of a Book Addict (2003)

on characters in the book trade (Martin Stone, Driff Field), thieves, booksellers in films, etc.

Rick Gekoski, Guardian, 9 March 2011 ¶ "scouting no longer works…" Oxfam, the internet… ¶ "Dealers were admitted on receipt of a business card, but 'the London boys' were mistrusted and made to feel as if they were casing the joint. ¶ They were. In those days, dealers went on 'scouting' trips, and might spend weeks on the road, driving from one such shop and village to the next, building up their inventory, taking advantage of knowing that little bit more than the local proprietors did."

"He opened books stalls in department stores, hardware stores, shoe shops...an idea many decades ahead of its time."

Reed Johnson, LA Times, 8 November 2010 ¶ bookstore in Boyle Heights

"There were numerous outbursts during that period, including a threat to put his entire CanLit collection in a dumpster and send it to a landfill. (It eventually ended up in Peter Howard’s Serendipity Books in Berkeley, California.)" ¶ prompted by differences with David Solway (over a book review), but ultimately a seasoned consideration of Hoffer.

"a brief memoir" by William Matthews (1997)

courtesy Alcuin Society

Fine Books (& Collections) blog

first of (so far) four installments… and now (July 13) five, and counting…

by Frances Dinkelspiel, Berkeleyside, 28 April 2010 ¶ I worked at Serendipity ca 1975-82. ¶ Puzzled Customer: “Is there any rhyme or reason to this place?” Peter B. Howard: “Yes! My rhyme! My reason!”

Alison Flood, Guardian, 14 June 2010 ¶ good range of comments, several critical of sentimental attachments to ye olde bookstore… one brings hardware stores into the picture. ¶ I like Harvard Book Store for its espresso printer, which oddly enough brings bookstores back into "publishing" that might have been done by "stationers" a couple of centuries back. hence the "genre" tag.

on PBH, quoting from Ian Jackson his The Key to Serendipity. Volume Two. How to Buy Books in Spite of Peter Howard. By Three Grasshoppers (2000), this : “This capacity of mind, the power instantly to grasp the

a beautiful story.

by Ellis Parker Butler, opens to entertaining passage on encyclopedias and telegraphs… ¶ elaborated from a story — "How the Compendium of Universal Knowledge Secured a Maid for Mrs. Tarbro-Smith" — that appeared in the Saturday Evening Post (March 25, 1905); the story (and the book) illustrated by May Wilson Preston ¶ see the compendious http://www.ellisparkerbutler.info/ ¶ he seems to have been fortunate in the illustrators of his books — Ethel Hayes!

"In the mid-1980s, as my own reading habits gained clearer direction and firmer purpose, I came under the influence, directly and indirectly, of Stuart Teitler, dealer, collector and scholar of old fantasy, especially lost race fiction. Stuart's guiding philosophy in these pursuits could be summed up in the maxim he gave me as a fledgling book scout: don't look for books, look at books." ¶ lovely essay, Introduction to a Catalog of Rare Books at LWCurrey.com, encountered whilst looking up Stuart Teitler, "lost" bookman, salsa and tap dancer extraordinaire (all), acquaintance from Berkeley years… ¶ now (April 2011) offline, but I leave this bookmark, for Stuart's aphorism.