It will be a massive week. So much going on.

It is Monday, April 28. Brilliant blue skies and the temperature in the upper 60s. A perfect day.

Bryan is driving us down to the Gaithersburg store. I’ll check on its progress and brainstorm the next phases there. I’m excited to see how they have done sales wise in April. Only a couple of days to wait.

A number of bookseller friends have told me they are stopping in to shop and visit and likely have dinners or two or three.

This is a bonus for the DC fair being “local.” In past years, they have bought a lot of expensive books. A LOT!

So, I’ll be socializing and making myself available for questions or dickering. (I don’t do much dickering though. Our pricing and trade discount are both attractive enough, I feel.)

The glass for the doors on the Gaithersburg collectible bookcases was ordered today. $8000! This expansion has been a bottomless pit of expense so far. And there is still a lot left to do.

All this extra work has me grumpy. I’m not able to play in the dirt much.

The weekend was the usual joyful drudgery. Cart after cart after…

It is still fun. Usually. I’ve surrendered to the fact that it is an endless Sisyphean task. I’ll just continue to go for the ride until I can’t do it any longer.

This weekend had many technical books presented to me. Young scientists of the 1940s and 50s and 60s are now aging out. Most intriguing are the books on early computers.

More on that later. We are here.

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Surprise! The shelving contractor appeared unannounced while I was there. I wish he’d warn me…

So, the week just got a little more complicated. I will need to return to decide what should go on the new bookcases.

While I was there, I dedicated some bookcases to the expansion of Sci Fi. That prompted me to bring Horror from its remote location to a section near Sci Fi. They belong together. Think The Twilight Zone. Plenty of horror and sci fi in Rod Sterling. He died far too young. Heavy smoker. I think he had a cigarette between his fingers whenever he introduced an episode.

I was so tired. I wonder if that means I am aging out. I was able to put in two full days. I’m pretty sure my work rate is as good as it’s always been. But when I got home, I was a limp noodle.

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Last Friday, April 25th

A BIG day for the Gaithersburg Wonder Book.

It has been a used bookstore since 1975. I’m sure my long passed mentor, Carl Sickles, could never have envisioned this happening 50 years on.

So many trees along Interstate 270 are blooming.

We are going to down with 2 vans and 4 guys—including me—to make sure things are clear for the contractor to install even more bookcases.

The venerable old shop is pretty torn up right now.

There are so many empty bookcases to fill.

No problem.

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We are on the way back.

So many revisions made. I’m stressed, and it is only 2 o’clock.

I hope this was a good idea.

So expensive.

I just want to go play in the woods.

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Wednesday, April 30th

Whew!

Met with the landlord, sign guy and the contractor at the Gaithersburg store. I also met with the store manager. I made about 20 on-the-spot decisions.

I love the “action.” I’m sure you can find my diagnoses in the DSM.

Ernest and I are driving back to Frederick. Big white cotton puffs of clouds against a blue sky 77 degrees. Spring is aging.

This morning, I cut short my journal writing and dug up 3 small redbud trees. I drove them down to the mound where the “Tree Farm” sign is. There are two store-bought redbuds there, but I think a little “grove” would be much more attractive. Two additional store-bought trees have died. It rained a lot last night, so the ground was moist for digging up the little trees. I made their holes extra large and filled them with composted manure. Giving them room to stretch their roots might help their survival and even speed their growth. I’d like to see them get big enough to bloom before I’m forced to move.

…Or move on.

I also dug up some bleeding heart babies, a “peaches and cream” strawberry plant and one balloon flower (platycodon) volunteer. I stuck those at the edges of the extra large tree holes. Then I went back in and showered.

Well, it’s a start. If I wait too long to do the transplanting, it will be summer, and their survivability will be lower.

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Thursday, May 1st

The morning brightens inexorably. I’d wish for a couple more hours of darkness. To doze or sleep perchance to dream a bit more. But the windows are open, and there’s nothing to keep the birdsong from rising with the sun. Their calls pour into my bedroom with the cool morning air.

60 degrees outside. I pull the bedclothes up to my neck. Pippin warms my feet lying across them. My knees are propped up, and the laptop rests upon my thighs.

May Day is a holiday in Europe celebrating the beginning of summer. But the summer solstice is still 51 days away—June 20th 10:42 p.m. There’s no reason to not celebrate such things as often as you like.

Though the leaves are tender, the forest has filled almost completely. My home is walled inside a cathedral of green.

The once barren forest floor has large swaths of fernbrakes.

Ferns going up the mountain as far as you can see.

Where there was no green but for sporadic mountain laurels and the rhododendrons I’ve planted, the world is now green above, below and all around here.

Spring or summer or both—it is here.

I set my phone on the windowsill. Better to hear the birds outside and have them identified by the Merlin app.

I rose and made the chilly walk, dishabille, to put the kettle on for tea.

The iPhone ignores the call of the teakettle but has recorded (I don’t know if the phone captured single birds or multiples):

Cardinals
Nighthawks
Blue Jays
Mourning Doves
Red-Eyed Vireos
Tufted Titmice
Red-Bellied Woodpeckers
Pileated Woodpeckers
House Sparrows
House Finches
Chipping Sparrows
Rough-Winged Swallows
Carolina Wrens
Phoebes
Chickadees
Great-Crested Flycatchers
Wild Turkeys
Scarlet Tanagers
Brown-Headed Cowbirds
Robins
Orioles
Crows
White-Throated Sparrows

All in about thirty minutes.

I’ll put the phone on the sill again and see if it can catch some more.

My friend Joe Phillips came up last night. He’s in town for The Capital Rare Book Fair. He spent April 30th driving down from New England. He has stores in Boston and Newport as well as New Orleans and Sarasota. Once here, he started searching the Frederick store for books to buy for his various locations. Then he came to the warehouse to scour the collectible rooms. We both ran out of energy in the late afternoon. He told me he’d brought a couple bottles of very good wine and asked if we could find a restaurant that would serve them for a corkage fee. I thought about it for a couple hours and then suggested I pick up some pizza and we have dinner on the mountain. I thought it might be calmer. We could chat and tour the gardens and the house and stretch the evening on as long as we wanted.

So, I ordered three Neapolitan pizzas from Cucino Forno. It is on the way home and is very… Napoli.

He made it up the mountain, and the first thing he did was uncork.

I set out a stinky soft French cheese and a blue cheese to get to room temperature.

He poured us each a glass and suggested we wait a bit for it to “open up.”

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The phone has added:

Black and White Warblers
Black-Throated Green Warbler

I should start a life list, but I think it is cheating if I don’t actually see the bird. Many of the less common ones live high up in the canopy and rarely come down.

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Joe and I toured the house first, glasses in hand, and he enjoyed my recently curated book collection. I think he was a bit stunned at the cleanup since his last visit, as well as the new framed things on the walls and the curtains…

I wasn’t expecting company, so there were dishes in the sink.

My first sip of the wine stopped me in my tracks. I often quip I can’t tell the difference between a good $20 bottle and a $100 bottle. But occasionally I’ll get a great wine, and the difference is clear.

There’s bad wine. There’s blah wine. There’s good wine… very good wine… etc.

Then there are wines like these.

Supernatural.

These wines I simply had to hold in my mouth and experience their complexities.

We made our way outside and walked around the gardens. There are still a few hundred late daffodils. The trillium colonies are just past their peak. The real stars are the hostas and ferns rising from the earth in various shades of green and vastly different textured leaves and fronds.

Where should we sit? It was nice enough to sit on the deck, but the view is better from the matched pair of chairs in the bay window. The chairs I inherited from Barbara’s estate. One chair was my regular spot on visits for many years. When the day ages and the sun descends into the forest behind the house, the light in the valley in front of the house goes through many phases. Though not as spectacular as the dawns facing the house, twilight is perhaps more nuanced. The pizza was excellent. Understated like it is in Naples, where it was invented in 1889.

It was a great evening. We sat and sipped and chatted about books, book friends and foes, war stories and life… and everything.

Joe’s bookselling life is one I greatly admire. He perfectly blends bookselling, travel, interesting events, food and drink in his four locations which he can visit on a whim—like when there’s a good music festival in New Orleans. Or the season is beginning in Newport. Or…

He gets some fabulous books too. He travels for those often as well. I can only imagine some of the fantastic estates he is called to around the US.

He was tired. He’d driven from Boston (or Newport) that morning. He’d scoured the Frederick store and found about 5 feet of plastic mail bins (ours are bright yellow) full of better books.

The rest of the day he spent in the warehouse treasure hunting the collectible rooms.

I was tired. I’d spent a few hours in Gaithersburg meeting with the landlord and sign maker and the contractor and the store manager. The landlord was very cooperative. He is a visionary. By far the best landlord I’ve ever had.

I just wish all the projects were done and the store’s reinvention was complete. It has come a long way in 2 months.

I made some more category shift decisions. Horror will end up next to Sci Fi.

Politics… the new religion… however, our Politics section was a bloated dumping ground. I think over the years if an employee didn’t know what to do with a historical book, it would get stuck in Politics.

I instructed Ernest to pull every book off those shelves that was not political. He found about 7 of 28 shelves were biographies (Supreme Court etc…) and histories (not political) etc.—NOT “Politics.”

“We’re going to shrink this mess. I hate politics,” I told him.

I gathered the staff and told them what I think of politics, “Political books in this store are about people yelling at other people, people claiming, ‘I’m right, and you’re wrong.’ If a book doesn’t fit into that definition, it doesn’t belong here.”

I felt some righteousness about that. Most “political” books are like old newspapers. Irrelevant. Who cares about… well, I better not mention any names. How about Herbert Hoover? Is he still controversial enough to raise passions? Do political polemics for or against him mean anything today?

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I had to go to court on Tuesday. I knew it was a waste of time. But I had to support a friend. It was all the way down in Glen Burnie—near Annapolis. I had to be there at 8. How early should I leave to be sure I’m not held up in traffic or something? I can’t go into the specifics, but the matter was ridiculous. The judge dismissed it within a few minutes. I didn’t have to say a word. But it might get refiled somehow.

I was not in a good mood when I got back late on Tuesday morning.

That was mitigated by some interesting finds.

This book looked like junk.

But something made me take a closer look.

Brian Epstein who discovered the Beatles at the Cavern Club in Liverpool in 1961.

You never know what you’re going to get when you unfold an Asian “accordion” book.

The wooden board wasn’t intriguing.

But…

Ahhhh…

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Thursday

I knew it would be a marathon day.

Joe was coming back. Jeff Bergman, whose smooth voice and calm demeanor are perfect match for the perfect books he specializes in, was coming from New Jersey. Ron, my old friend and mentor, was driving down from Buffalo with a huge van of books. Is he really 80 now? Mike Cotter (Back in Time) would be coming up from Florida as well.

Annika wanted to pull some books from the cases at the Frederick store to take to the show. I thought I should go over with her so the staff knew I was ok with her taking books. The show has been her project this year. 100%. I’ve been hands off 100%. All I did was choose and pay for the best booth I could get. I hope it is a success if only to reward her passion and handwork.

The rest of the day was yet another whirlwind of booksellers and books and problems and questions and… Why am the only one who sees this problem… or that…?

Makes me grumpy.

Joe found two cartloads of books.

He brought one box of special things for me to review.

These are the ones I selected.

I worked on carts. Clif and Deb finished the yarn collection. (It is selling pretty well.)

Clark texted that all three stores were up double digits over April 2024.

Unbelievable.

And despite my efforts, my work is just more and more backlogged.

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It is Friday. A beautiful spring morning. A cool breeze is flowing in the bedroom window. Three dogs are snoozing on the bed next to me.

I slept pretty well, despite Pip’s coughing. (I bought a bag of earplugs in the hunting section at Walmart.) Giles decided he needed to “see a man about a dog” about 3 a.m. So I had to let him out.

I took my friends to dinner last night. I was exhausted and stressed from the week and the work. Too many balls in the air. A friend from work joined us. They did most of the talking and reminiscing.

They brought up memories of the New York shows when I’d stay at the Waldorf and entertain them there.

The memories flooded back unannounced. The Waldorf is gone. I’ll love her til the day I die.

Those were the best times. So many things I would have done differently.

Will she ever reopen? Will I ever go back?

It has been a very productive year. So many things have been accomplished.

A race against time.

It just doesn’t seem fair.

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I found I can see the sunrise looking down the driveway—if only for a morning or two before it moves further north into the forest.

And this guy was crossing the driveway in front of me.

I’m glad I saw him in time.

Why is he a box turtle, not a tortoise?