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Even Hercule Poirot might be stumped by the death of Normal Heights’ most fabled book store. Like an Agatha Christie mystery, there’s no shortage of suspects.
Was the culprit Amazon?
Fading interest in the printed word?
Or was the Adams Avenue Book Store’s fate sealed by the disappearance of a shadowy figure, the book scout?
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“Assigning blame is a tough game,” said Brian Lucas, 70, the store’s owner, citing rising costs and falling revenues. “It’s not lining up any more.”
Who killed Adams Avenue’s iconic book store? One suspect: the vanishing book scout
From coast to coast, established vendors of used collectible volumes have died. The casualties included some prominent names: Gotham Book Mart in Manhattan, Dutton’s in Los Angeles, Shakespeare & Co. in Berkeley. Downtown San Diego once boasted seven or eight shops, led by Wahrenbrock’s Book House on Broadway. Today, they’re all gone.
Collectors often say that they only regret ‘the ones that got away’. That feeling of loss at having missed out on something is much the same whether one collects paintings, fossils, sculpture, ceramics or stamps. It only intensifies when the thing being collected is particularly hard to come by, but, conversely, can be relieved by the small triumph of acquiring something else that others have overlooked or not managed to secure. In my own case, these feelings are palpable in relation to (arguably) one of the most niche areas of collecting: bookplates. As a child, I was forever creating collections of things: coins, postcards, badges, stones and even novelty erasers. In adulthood this mindset of acquisition and organisation has been focused, outside my professional life as a museum curator and director, into an enthusiasm for the more specialised domain of bookplates, informed by my love of wood engraving and illustrated books.
The woke mobs of the cancel culture have come for Winston Churchill, both here in the United States and in his home country, where the man was long considered a hero who did nothing short of save England and Western civilization, defeating what he called the “devil” and “evil” of Hitler and the Nazis and confronting the “plague bacillus” of Soviet communism. In fact,
Time Magazine at the half-century point (while Churchill was still alive) judged him “Man of the Half-Century,” and many Americans and Brits alike at the end of the 20
th century dubbed him Man of the Century. Not unjustifiably so.
Papa Spy: Love, Faith and Betrayal in Wartime Spain by Burns, Jimmy at AbeBooks.co.uk - ISBN 10: 0747595208 - ISBN 13: 9780747595205 - Bloomsbury Publishing PLC - 2009 - Hardcover