Rumor has it that Seattle's venerable Elliott Bay Book Company is on the move. Paul Constant, the book editor at the Stranger and a former Elliott Bay employee, his hearing murmurs on Capitol Hill that Elliott Bay has found a new home and will be leaving Pioneer Square. Elliot Bay has been in Pioneer Square since its inception in 1973 and has been an upper-tier independent bookseller on the national level for almost as long.Though still in the rumor stage, the story broke at 4pm on Friday, the mere possibility is seismic. Pioneer Square, the City of Seattle, and the...
Oakland’s New Secondhand Tax: The Used Bookshop Now a Pawnshop
The city of Oakland has implemented a new tax on sellers of used goods that, in effect, now places the used bookshop in the same realm as the pawn shop.The tax, which is based on the state's Secondhand Dealers' law; a 50-year-old law written to help police locate stolen goods, will cost bookshops at least $600 a year and force them to fingerprint employees and "keep meticulous, detailed notes of every item they buy and sell, including the private personal information of the persons involved in each transaction."Failure to comply with the law is considered a misdemeanor and carries a...
Mumford & Sons Plays the Bookshop
With a name like Mumford & Sons you might be thinking law firm or publisher or perhaps an accounting or construction firm but no, Mumford & Sons is a group of literate twentysomethings out of London who play folk music and love books.In preparation for their upcoming tour the band played two gigs at used bookshops on Charing Cross Road! They shows, at Quinto and Any Amount of Books, are part of a campaign to save the endangered independent bookshop.Nearly half the songs on their upcoming album Sigh No More, are inspired by books. One song "Timshel", has its roots...
Free, Fast, And Hot Off The Press Delivery
You're perusing the latest issue of your favorite magazine, The New Yorker. (Let's be honest here, if you're like me it's more likely you're taking a gander at the latest People Magazine-- we have to keep up with Kate Gosselin, right?) Anyway, next you and I check out the book reviews, and there it is: a four star review of the newest E.L. Doctorow novel, Homer and Langley. Terrific! Doctorow is one of our favorite writers, and he's writing about the legendary Collyer Brothers, who wrote the book on disposophobia, and eventually died as they lived: in a Harlem brownstone...
Fighting Crime One Book at a Time
We are very pleased to welcome Nancy Mattoon to Book Patrol with this, her first post. Nancy will be walking the library beat, covering news, issues, and human interest stories from the stacks with her thirty years of experience and perspective as a librarian.As librarians are well aware, even in the book world no good deed goes unpunished. Getting the right book into the right hands seems innocent enough—until it isn’t. Headline hungry scribes sometimes seek to link books and crime; the permanent stain on “The Catcher in the Rye” after being found in the possession of both Mark David...