New Year’s morning
The cold is returning, but the woodstove has the house cozy at 71.
I went to bed at 10 last night. No need to stay up. The dogs were also disinterested.
There were fireworks and gunshots somewhere out in the distance. The dogs don’t like that.
Giles began his annoying soft whining.
“Shut up, Giles!” (One doesn’t need to speak politely to dogs.)
He whined me awake about 4 a.m. It was his “I need to go out” whine. That can’t be avoided, so I rose and let him out into the dark. I leave the porch lights on so there’s something to guide him home should he wander out of sight. The fire was doing ok but would need more wood in the morning. There were only 3 chunks on the porch, and they were too large to fit in the opening where the double doors opens. Foolish. I usually have a good eye when I’m cutting or splitting firewood. These will need to be returned to the barn and split smaller.
“Well, I’m up. Might as well go fetch a cartload of wood.”
It was raining hard when I got home from Wonder Book last night. I didn’t want to get soaked, so I didn’t bring a cartload of firewood from the barn. There is a lot of wood on the covered front porch downstairs, but that is all smaller logs and kindling.
So, create a mental picture of Mr. Wonder in his nightclothes—a 30-year-old tattered Partagas sweatshirt (I had a very brief cigar relationship with golf buddies but really didn’t like the taste—and especially the aftertaste) and the Old Navy sweatpants I bought so I’d be presentable for my arm surgery in November. I was wearing slippers as I crossed the drive and paved “landing zone” from the house to the barn. I tossed logs into the black plastic big two-wheel cart and rolled it back to the side porch entrance. The piece I brought in was still too large to drop through the top hole of the stove. So, down on my knees, I wrestled the chunk onto the bed of coals in the firebox.
That’s my first memory of 2025.
Dog poop and hauling firewood.
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
My second memory is the guilty pleasure of reading a few more chapters of The Charing Cross Mystery by J. S. Fletcher. He wrote over 230 books, over 100 of which are detective novels. (How could he keep track?) My battered and worn copy was printed in 1923—a century ago.
(The outside is even uglier. Definitely a “reading copy.”)
This brings me full circle for one of the first books I picked up and read was a J. S. Fletcher mystery that came into the shop when I was a beginning bookseller.
It is comfort reading. If Fletcher cheats on the “rules” of Golden Age mystery writing, it can be overlooked. (The women were twin sisters?! Indeed!)
That this mystery is 101 years old and takes place in London adds to the pleasure. The streets and underground stations are familiar to me. Edgware Road, Paddington, Trafalgar, Charing Cross… So much is unchanged in that city. But the technology and daily life were quite different a hundred years ago, and that adds to the pleasure of time travel.
(I long to return to London. Travel still leaves me nervous. There were a lot of trips in 2024, and a few didn’t end well. The COVID I brought back from Portugal for Christmas in 2023 lasted well into 2024—spells of long COVID, I suspect. A mystery illness in Dublin that may have been food poisoning. Uncontrollable coughing finished the Scandinavian tour from Stockholm to Copenhagen and back into Maryland. Then there was my interaction with the big motorized bike driven by a big woman in Amsterdam. The long expeditions through Turkey and then Northern Italy were both fine, as was the iconic week in Paris. Maybe I’m just “traveled out” for a while.)
2024 turned out great for Wonder Book, however.
Boom!
All the stores were up in December.
Gaithersburg had its best month ever. (We took it over in 2008.)
For Frederick and Hagerstown, there’s still a long way to go to get back to the Golden Age days of the 1990s, but the stores are filled with happy customers. And Frederick having its best month of this millennium means something.
And all the books being re-homed. There’s satisfaction in that.
All the books…
New Year’s Eve for me began out in the woods. The pickup truck had been parked out there for four or five days. I’d maneuvered it up the Mulch Road—backward. There was a lot of deadfall wood lying about, including the big maple whose top half broke off last spring and broke an iron railing and a bit of the big deck. There’s also the ash that the Virgin Mary statue is secured to.
That died and was dropped a couple few months ago.
Rain has kept me from loading and retrieving the truck.
And what with my Amsterdam arm injury and other tasks, I just haven’t had the chance to get out there. So, I spent an hour in the daylight of morning loading wood. I enjoy that very much. The afternoons get so dark so early it is pointless to try then. The forest floor is very rocky and uneven. Tripping hazards are often hidden by the thick layer of dry, dead, brown leaves carpeting everything. It wouldn’t do to have a misadventure out there in the dark. 2024 had plenty of misadventures, and I wouldn’t want to add one more before it finally ended. I had Christmas carols playing in my pocket via the iPhone and Pandora app—still. (I had carols on almost every night for a few weeks in an effort to make my Christmas spirit “bright.”)
So, there was a lot of lifting and hoisting tree parts onto my shoulder and stepping gingerly or shuffling through the crunchy leaves to the truck.
Now I have a couple more weeks of heat to dump by the side porch entrance and cut up. It will dry quickly because it’s been dead so long even though it has lain on the damp ground.
My right hand hurts. Especially two middle fingers, which I suspect now were broken by the big Dutch motorbike and the large young woman atop it. The real damage was to the left arm, but it is the right hand where the memory of my accident lingers. After using the hand for physical things, those two fingers ache and refuse to close entirely.
Well, they “will either get better or they won’t.”
December 30th, Monday
Ernest and I are driving to the Frederick store. It has been a while since I visited any of the stores. The warehouse labors have not let me escape. Also, I’ve been so focused on internal personal issues. I haven’t wanted to see anyone.
It is a beautiful day. Blue skies. Almost 50 degrees and getting warmer. I should go home and do the outdoor tasks still remaining. The surgery and other issues kept me from doing much heavy physical labor in the fall.
The store looks great. There were a lot of customers for a Monday morning. I enjoy helping people. I don’t get the chance very often.
One customer wanted Robert Jordan.
Easy! Sci Fi. I left him there and went back to work.
‘I bet we have some signed editions in the cases,’ I thought and went to check the collectible cases.
“We have some signed ones in the glass cases. Would you like me to show you?”
I think he bought two. I wish it was always so easy.
“Spy School Graphic Novels?”
“What’s that?” I wondered.
I asked at the counter and was told, “Gibbs writes those, but kids’ graphic novels are by the $1 kids’ book section.”
Hmmm… There are Spy School novels in kids’ books but no graphic novels.
“We keep the kids graphic novels by the $1 section,” I was told.
I left the customers there to hunt.
The stores are vast treasure hunting spaces.
Thursday, January 2nd
I awoke just after 4 a.m. So dark and quiet. A nice glowing fire in the woodstove ten paces away.
Is 4 a.m. morning or night? Of course, the internet can give me the answer. Or, rather, “an” answer.
This chart states that:
Night is 9 p.m. to 4 a.m.
Morning is 5 a.m. til noon.
(What is 4:30?)
Afternoon is noon to 5.
5 to 9 is “Evening.”
It doesn’t matter. I’m awake.
(I’ve decided that 4:30 a.m. is a magic time. You are “in between.” It is an unquantified period. Perhaps there is a time portal then.)
The dogs sensed my consciousness and made their passive-aggressive movements to get me up to let them out.
While I awaited the “let me in” bark, I put tea on and cleaned up the kitchen a bit.
I roasted another turkey last night. The second one this week?
Why?
I’m a sucker for bargains, and at 50 cents a pound, they’re much cheaper than any dog food.
While turkey #2 was roasting, I cut up #1.
I chopped and tore some breast meat into a saucepan and poured jarred turkey gravy over it. Added some herbs and spices. A few dashes of hot sauce. Then I put it on to heat.
Then a few slices of caraway rye bread off the round loaf from Wegmans were set in the oven to toast.
Crunchy bread, turkey and gravy—comfort food from my childhood.
I made some more “nacho” Thomas’s English Muffins. I split 5 of them and put ’em on foil on a cookie sheet. Spread refried beans with a butter knife. Sliced Irish cheddar off a big Costco brick (which I wonder if I’ll ever use up) and set those on the muffins. Then I placed pickled jalapeno slices on the top like one would pepperoni slices on a mini pizza. I baked them til the cheese melted and then broiled them a few minutes to get a little brown “skin” on the cheese.
Comfort food for a cold night.
And now I’ll have a supply frozen for future cold nights that call for some hot and spicy fare.
I’d worked hard on New Year’s Day. The stores and warehouse were open regular hours. We discovered most people don’t really care. But still many people were absent.
After some paperwork and meetings, I went to play with books.
Ernest is going through a horde from a bookseller in Maine who wanted us to take all their store stock. The focus could change to just “better books.” This was BC (before COVID)—2018? We shipped 1000 (maybe not that many) Books by the Foot boxes to an island in Maine. They packed them and drove them to Maryland in a big truck. (I think the Maine store may have since reopened.) We went through a lot of them, and they were mostly problematic.
“Tweeners.”
Books in between being modern and easily quantifiable online and being very old and marketable as vintage on Books by the Foot if they weren’t interesting enough to be sold by title or author or binding and, obviously, nothing very high-end and collectible.
We were both unhappy. The Maine bookseller wasn’t happy that there was no additional payment from the base we had offered. (We paid for the boxes and transport and solved their “book elimination” problem.) We were unhappy because we had a huge quantity of books we didn’t really want and were so low on the “to do” list that most of them rested on pallets stacked about 7 feet high for 6 years or more.
They became a wall for one of the sorters to keep people from bothering her. (They still find a way in.) They even remained unpacked during the severe shortages during COVID when the governor ordered that no one could travel.
Things have gotten slow enough that I tasked Ernest to revisit them.
Though the boxes came in randomly, these happen to have a lot of pretty antiquarian books in them.
Go figure.
Anyway, that just created more work for me because Ernest just carts up books he wants me to see—the “old stuff.”
I’m sending a lot to The Boutique—that part of our website where we offer “Books for Their Looks” as opposed to their content.
Ok. Ok. Don’t groan. These are beautiful objects that would get lost in the 2 million plus listings on www.wonderbook.com. Words alone could not convey what makes them desirable. Plus, no one would go looking for so many of these titles and authors to read or collect. They’d be “Lost in Cyberspace.”
We can’t put them in the stores. Too fragile. And a bit too expensive for casual buyers. And sets take a lot of space.
Now I don’t know if I should reach out 6 years later and say, “The books were not as bad as I thought in 2018…”
Then there is the horde dropped off earlier in December by our young DC bookseller friends.
(When is a bookseller young, a “tweener” and old? Maybe it is like the “stages of the day”?)
I started out as a young bookseller. There were a lot of “tweener” years. Then… what happened?!
We have a good symbiotic relationship with them. They sell us books they don’t want or have given up on. We let them shop the stores at a deep discount if they buy more than a thousand at a time. The “thousand” threshold represents a therapeutic purge for us. They will take some things we regret to let go of, but they will also take a lot that will create room for fresh stock to be brought in.
It is a “win/win.”
A few years ago, they acquired a vast horde of modern first editions. Was it 30,000? I don’t know. I wasn’t involved. A lot of them are from the bookselling era called the Hyper Modern Boom. (Maybe I’m the one that calls it that.) This period of biblio-speculation had collectors buying recent first editions for crazy prices. When the internet bookselling era began, it became clear that there were far more copies of most of these books than there were buyers.
CRASH!
The modern firsts—huge percentage of them—became “penny books” online.
The same phenomena happened with modern baseball cards and comic books.
I guess they got into an end-of-the-year purge mode and sent a LOT of boxes to us.
While many are worthless and destined for Books by the Foot as the only option, there are some that are still collectible—especially if in perfect condition and dust jacketed.
That’s where I come in. Cart after cart are loaded and “Chuck” slips set on them.
They gleam in rank after rank of colorful “Brodarted” jackets.
And many of them are signed or have signed bookplates laid in. (That often doesn’t help in marketing as many authors signed vast quantities of their books on tours to bookstores around the country.)
I wonder at the collector. I don’t know the details, but he or she had to have had at least one “conservator” employed. Someone had to acquire the books. Solicit signed bookplates from authors. Wrap the jackets. Acquire facsimile jackets where needed. (Those cost about $25 each now I think.) The library must have looked magnificent. And don’t get me wrong, the collector had some wondrous first editions as well as the hypermoderns.
Sigh…
So, I plow through cart after looking for cherries among the pits. (I know that’s not apt, but I think it’s funny.)
Thomas McGuane—signed? A keeper.
Then I get sentimental and send maybe too many to be put online.
(“They’re so pretty… And they used to be worth good money…”)
It just adds to the overload.
But there are good books flowing in as well.
I’m sure you know Currer Bell. And “his” brothers Acton and Ellis.
The Bronte sisters.
They even published a book of poetry together under those pseudonyms.
Poor Annika and Madeline. They’re drowning in collectible books to research.
Poor me.
But the work keeps me from mooning and glooming. As well as moaning and groaning.
And comic books!
A beautiful lot of Silver Age Marvels are coming to the Frederick store soon.
Now it is Friday morning already.
This first blog of 2025 is
#390
of consecutive Fridays since the first one published in July 2017.
I need to start writing more fictional book stories again.
There’s a New Year resolution!
The family all got together for a belated Christmas celebration last Sunday. It was the first time all three grandchildren were together. (The youngest is only 3 weeks old.)
I gave the 1-year-old an antique child size rocker.
It was very gratifying.
Some wishes come true.
Some don’t.
Larry brought in 500 or more skeins of yarn.
LOL… Wonder Book and Knitting.
#wool rescue…
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