On the North River

The beleaguered bookseller said late Thursday that comparable-store sales slid 6.4 percent during the crucial nine-week period ending Dec. 30.

A Boston Globe story.  No link, I don’t link to The Boston Globe.

At one time (before the fire) I had a library and a very large collection of books up in the attic, mostly Science Fiction but I  read history, biography, detective stories . . . etc.  Two thousand? Three thousand?  Not sure, it had been years since I had last tried to count.

I have maybe a hundred books now, mostly older titles and all old friends inside the covers.  During the late fall power failure (due to a tree down across the driveway and the power line)  I started rereading the Hornblower books, starting with Mr. Midshipman Hornblower.  During the current sub-zero cold snap I’ve finished Commodore Hornblower and are about to crack the cover of Lord Hornblower.

Oddly enough Lord Hornblower is the oldest book I still have, since I rescued it from the old bookshelf at my parents house before it was sold.  It is one of the first books I read through it was (I was told) above my reading level.  I think I was eight.  My grandmother worked as a bookbinder at Little & Brown in Boston (No, she was not a robot, human beings used to do that kind of work exclusively).   She brought all kinds of books home, books that were ‘irregulars’ and dumped into a bin that employees could pick through.  When I first read it, C. S. Forester (the author) was still alive.  As I grew older I hunted down the rest of the Hornblower books, about the time I acquired the last full novel, “Hornblower in the West Indies”,  I discovered that the author had passed away.  That was the first time I experienced that shock and sense of loss.  I was to feel that way again several times; from Robert Heinlein to most recently Jerry Pournelle.   For me, books are personal and close friends as are many of the authors.  (The only two I have really known and spent time with was Isaac Asimov and Harry Stubbs, both NESFA members.)

Needless to say I’ve spend a lot of time in libraries and bookstores in the early years of my life.  Though I spent a lot of money at Borders I don’t morn it as much as many of the smaller bookstores I used to go to, it’s hard to grow an attachment to a corporate entity.  Ditto for Barnes and Noble,  the first bookstore to introduce ‘loyalty’ cards to the bookselling business.  For which I do not love them.  But; “The Million Year Picnic”, “Avenue Victor Hugo”,  the Harvard Square bookstore (the independent one, not the Coop). . . and many, many others that I did love.

In fact it is the memories of the cherished small bookstores of my youth that caused me to start writing.  (May not get posted, much of what I write when it’s personal and stream of conscious-like doesn’t get posted.)   In Brookline I read that the independent bookstore that has been there for years has triumphed  over the Barnes and Noble chain store, that has now closed.  I like that.

I think that in general I like small over big.  Small bookstores, small vegetable stands, small restaurants and (of course) small government over Big Government.   I’m almost tempted to try to start a small bookstore/cafe of my own.  Almost.  I’m still in Taxacusetts, so I doubt it.  Then there is the current American trend towards illiteracy,  functional illiteracy at least.

Bitcoin, Kakistocracy – Bitcoin has fallen by over 80% three previous times. If its inherent utility is as an alternative currency, then it will remain unsuitable for that purpose so long as holders don’t know whether their current balance will purchase a Porsche or a pineapple. Did you know the IRS has ruled that every bitcoin transaction represents a taxable event? Not just investment entry and exit. Everything. This would be like having to record and report a dollar cost and sales basis every time you bought a hamburger. With failure to do so exposing you to criminal evasion charges. This alone represents the type of intractable friction that destroys a currency use case.