we tend to house our
products according to value
that we put on them
Yesterday my wife and I drove up to Beautiful Beaufort by the Sea, South Carolina for the Friends of the Beaufort County Library Book Sale.
It was held in the waterfront pavilion in downtown Beaufort.
I have been to and taken part in a lot of Friends of the Library book sales in my day but never one outdoors, along the coast, and in November.
I am at a time in my life when divesting of accumulated books is more on my mind than accumulating more physical books (As I buy more and more tablets to hold more and more e books – and for those who wag a finger, I also have a solar power tablet charger for when my Twilight Zone ‘Time enough at Last’ event happens) but then you just never know what a book sale might have and what I might find.
And what I found was a biography of the great …. MAX PERKINS!
Most likely you have never heard of him which is the way it should be.
He was a book editor and it was his job to remain anonymous while making an author’s writing better.
The author’s Mr. Perkins edited include F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe.
I got through the first page, just the first page, where the author described the Charles Scribner and Son’s bookstore in New York City.
A bookstore that is no longer around, but it is still remembered as being in the top five of bookstores ever in the world.
Wikipedia writes: “The building opened by May 18, 1913, and became the seventh headquarters of Charles Scribner’s Sons. In addition to the bookstore and offices at 597 Fifth Avenue, Scribner’s had a building at 311–319 West 43rd Street for its printing press. The development of the 597 Fifth Avenue building was described by architectural writer Robert A. M. Stern in 1983 as “sure testimony to the rapid march of commerce to upper Fifth Avenue”. New York Times journalist David W. Dunlap, writing in 2012, said 597 Fifth Avenue was like “the Apple store of its day”. At opening, the bookstore contained shelves of books arranged along both the ground floor and the balconies.”
I went looking online for photographs of the store and came across the blog, Jeremiah’s
Vanishing New York which on February 8, 2010, had a post titled, Scribner’s Bookstore, where the Jeremiah discusses the store and its contents.
The author wrote, It’s difficult to imagine anyone in New York today providing such an opulent setting in which to sell books. We tend to house our products according to the value we put on them.
I like that line as I think of the bookstores that are left to us today.
And then I thought about the book sale had just left.
In an open air pavilion.
In a park.
Along the waterfront, 2 miles from the Atlantic Ocean.
Such an opulent setting in which to sell books.
We do tend to house our products according to the value we put on them.
No Haiku For You 