The Domesday Book is a complete survey of much of England and some of Wales ordered by the Norman invader king…

‘Where is it?’ I wondered, worried about my short-term memory.

‘I put it somewhere safe half an hour ago.’

“Have you seen it?” I asked Caryn to whom I was going to give it.

I have forgotten where I’ve put things all my life. As a young man, I recall walking into a room and wondering what it was I had come in there for. Some maybe it isn’t Alzheimer’s.

‘I found it on Dock 2. It has to be somewhere between there and the end of the sorting area. Unless someone moved it, like the Scopes monkey pamphlet that I’d promised Garrett. I had to dig through boxes of DNA to find that again. If I’d put a “Chuck” slip on it, she wouldn’t have gotten into it, but then I temporarily laid it somewhere where I shouldn’t have.’

I wandered back and forth, scanning the tops of carts and palletized boxes.

‘It’s gone.’

A little later, I looked into an open box atop a cart. There it was! I’d set it in that box atop a Little Mermaid set in perfect condition that should make a child very happy this Christmas.

I lifted it and carried IT to Caryn’s station.

She can evaluate its current market price. Stephen King continues to sell extremely well. He’s not really my cup of tea (or blood), but the public loves him. I watched The Shining early this week. It was in a box set of Kubrick movies. At first, I wondered if it would give me nightmares, but then the film evolved into the absurd, and even though I didn’t laugh at it, I sat through the ending with its random ghosts and contrived deus ex machina (a real “machine.”)

There’s a massive cloud sailing slowly below my house this Saturday morning.

It rained last night. When are low clouds the same as fog? I guess I will find out when I get down to the valley. I’ll see if I am in the mist or below it.

I left work after everyone else yesterday. A call from the doctor’s office put me into a daze. A call on a Friday after 5 p.m. is never welcome.

Well, it will either get better or it won’t.

Just put one foot in front of the other and go forward.

Just inching closer to the first foot in the grave.

I spent Friday night scared and cold and alone.

The woodstove is still hot this Sunday morning. It will get to 65 degrees today, so there’s no need to put more wood in it… unless I want to save the trouble of kindling a new fire when I get home tonight.

The first freeze is coming. This week’s lows will be in the 20s.

This morning, it is 50. But it is raining. When I let Pip out just now, I followed him. Barefoot on wet leaf-covered pavement, I bent and lifted a large split log and brought it in. I won’t want to look for kindling in the dark tonight and hope the fire starts with the first match on crumbled newspaper. I left the wood outside because it was infested. When the splitter broke these logs open, hundreds of dormant carpenter ants were revealed in the heart of the pieces of dead tree. If they came inside, the warm house would awaken them, and thousands of shiny tiny sinister robots would be crawling on the floors and walls and ceilings.

The stuff of nightmares.

In the hot stove, the demons will be incinerated, killed in their sleep like the astronauts HAL killed the other when I watched 2001.

Saturday was surreal at the sprawling warehouse. My mind was split. The new health worries. The routine of looking at thousands of books and other used, castoff things.

I HAVE NO SYMPTOMS! At least nothing I can feel.

Surprisingly, I am getting caught up on many of the carts. (There is still a lot I can’t bring myself to face.)

Christmas is coming soon. The types of books I send to the stores shift to include holiday books. Also, more “gift” things—for mom, dad, grandpa, grandma, kids…

Then it was time to leave. I called the dogs to the back row of seats in the pickup and bade them jump in. Pip raised his near-blind eyes, and I saw he would need to be hoisted up.

Then I drove across town as I have done thousands of times to the shopping center where the Wonder Book store is. But first I went into the Modern Asia restaurant there. The reception area was packed with people waiting to be seated or to pick up carryout orders. When it was my turn, I ordered Yu Shang Eggplant and Hunan Chicken/Shrimp/Cashews to take home. I left and walked the hundred yards or so to the bookstore I created in 1980 and moved to this location in 1990.

It was aglow! We had put in all new lighting last week. I have been disappointed for about ten years in “new, free, energy-saving lights” installed around 2015. Something about the light was depressing. Now you can read the titles on the bottom shelves in the far corners. I wandered through the place. Some of the employees recognized me, but I was anonymous amongst the many customers browsing the shelves. In my worn black hoodie and battered stained jeans, I may have looked like an impecunious book nut, looking for cheap editions to buy and take home to my cold lonely hermitage.

Well, they’d got the last part right.

The morning is cold and wet, but there is still much gold on the trees, which warms the heart.

A full moon. The Beaver Moon—whatever that is.

Moonlight bleaches the forest floor.

This world is defined in black and white.

And lifeless gray.

When will dawn color this world and chase dark shadows away?

The weekend is a blur of books and Christmas junk.

Saturday, I had a Gaylord—a giant cardboard box atop a wooden pallet—taken out to the loading docks and emptied. It was “stuff” Larry dropped off in 2023. Maybe it was a storage unit or somebody’s garage. We need space, and I took a chance on the “Mystery In a Box.”

“Just take everything out and spread it on the floor, please.”

‘Well, that’s timely. Christmas is coming,’ I thought. I’d had no idea what was in the box. I looked at it and groaned. ‘Dreary. I’ll mess with it tomorrow.’

When I was leaving after 5 with the three dogs in the back of my old crew cab pickup truck, I encountered Larry driving in the dockyard gate in a big 24-foot box truck.

‘It’s Saturday evening. We’re closed,’ I thought. But it is reality. We have a symbiotic relationship, regardless of the timing not always being right.

I pushed the button, and my window went down. “Whatdya got?”

“A lot of boxes.”

“I’ll come back and open the dock door for you.”

Fortunately, Dock 2 was clear. Dock 1 was littered with Christmas (and dolphin and old sea captain…) geegaws.

“Close the door when you leave and text me so I can set the alarm.”

An hour or so later he texted, “190 boxes…”

Great. We already had no space.

Now we have more than no space.

Well, it is Monday morning. The woodstove is still hot. I will stoke it, as the high today will be 49. I need to bring a cartload of wood from the barn to the house before I go to work. I’ll put a log or two in the firebox before I leave to keep the fire alive til I get home. Most of the leaves were blown from the trees over the weekend.

We will ship out 30,000-plus books today. That would make a stack about 3,500 feet tall. It doesn’t help with space though. They all came off shelves. Empty or full, shelves take up the same amount of space.

The flames dance against the glass doors of the woodstove ten steps from my bed. Everything else is blackness. The week is ending. We will ship another 30,000+ books out today.

It has been a whirlwind week. More than that. What is mightier than the whirlwind? Last time, we were this busy was when we were moving the warehouse in 2013-2014. I have to be everywhere in the building. I’ve had to be in Zoom calls with people I’ll never meet.

We are in crisis mode. I’m in subdued panic mode. The leader can’t show fear or panic or weakness.

I can’t be weak. Too much work to do.

Two big truckloads of charity sale leftovers came Monday morning on top of Larry’s 200-box drop-off (He also had artwork, bricabrac, media, LPs…) Plus, we had 3 van swaps from the stores over the weekend. So, 5 full vans here at the warehouse. 8 vans and trucks at the three stores. How many of those are full? We will find out when they open and Clif calls them.

By the end of the day, we simply couldn’t get all the boxes in the building.

I can’t recall the last time we left books outdoors.

Fortunately, there is no rain forecast til next week.

How can I help?

Wednesday. I got a call from my old friend Tom at the 19th Century Shop.

“There’s a guy with a dozen boxes of old books of his father’s. We don’t want any of them, but there are some Byron firsts. I’m not taking anything out. I think you’ll want most for Books by the Foot. Maybe a hundred dollars.”

“Ok. Send him over with those expectations.”

An hour later, I was paged to Dock 1. The guy was on the ground. The boxes were on a pallet.

I peered into a few of them. They looked nice. But I recalled from my early days not to get excited about Byron firsts (except a few.) Odd. There’s a huge demand for the other Romantic poet titans. But if a great rare book company like 19th Century was passing, these wouldn’t be much.

‘Beautiful though…’ I thought.

“My mom sent them up from Arkansas. My dad was an English professor. He won a poker game, and another professor couldn’t pay, so he offered my dad his Byron collection.”

I offered 200. Twice what I thought his expectations would be. He looked crestfallen.

“I found one of these online for 350.”

“Listing and selling are two different things. Was 350 the lowest listed price?”

Back and forth.

“If these were great, 19th Century would have been all over them,” I explained. “You can try someone else, but I think they’d likely refuse 10 of your 12 boxes, and then you’d have to start again.”

I eventually came up to 350.

“Can you make it 400?”

“No.”

“375?”

“No. Sorry.”

Maybe I’ll get into them this week and put pictures on next Friday.

Space. Space. My kingdom for some space. Enough for maybe 500 boxes lying out in the dockyard’s cold sun.

What can I do?

Carts, my primary domain, take up the same amount of space full or empty. Rarely can I get into DNA pallets. Every pallet I empty creates a 48×40-inch “footprint.” The DNA pallets are very fun. I’m killing off pallets again. Making footprints.

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead.
In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility…

The game’s afoot:
Follow your spirit, and upon this charge
Cry ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George!’

Trash and treasure. Sorters put stuff they can’t decide to simply throw away into boxes. The boxes get stacked on pallets, and those are labeled DNA—Do Not Add. When I get the joy of playing with them, I set up next to a recycling Gaylord. Trash—magazines, scraps of newspaper, old mail, free publications… I can toss into recycling. On the floor on the other side of me are 5 boxes. $1.59, $3.95… There’s an empty cart within reach for things I want to force online.

Lift, look and toss.

Lift, look, toss…

Here are a couple of treasures that anyone else might have thrown away.

Beirut was once called the Paris of the Middle East.

I’m no monkey neither. This must have been a reaction to the Scopes trial.

I wandered by a sorting station later Wednesday. Some polished leather called to me.

“DIAL? No. Impossible.”

“The Waste Land.” Part of the mantra of my life.

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
[…]

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
[…]

Time to send this off.

It is Friday at 11 a.m.

We’ve managed to unload two trucks this morning.

And loading a third with the next 30,000+ books going to the biggest deal we’ve ever had.

Where? Why? I don’t know and couldn’t tell you anyway. Maybe in my memoirs.