From The Seattle Review of Books

Meet Brad Craft, University Book Store’s used book buyer

Published 11 hours ago by Paul Constant

Brad Craft, the used book buyer at University Book Store, says he “didn’t grow up in a bookish atmosphere” — he didn’t have access to a good library, and none of his teachers introduced him to the joys of literature. Where did he learn to love books? “Yard sales,” he says. He was especially drawn to a certain type of book: “I’ve read more gothic romance novels than most men my age,” Craft explains. He assumed the bodice-rippers that he bought from his neighbors were classics of literature. “They looked like classics to me,” he says. The women on the covers “were in historical costumes,” after all, just maybe with a little more cleavage than you’d find on the cover of your typical Bronte book. For a long time, Craft says, “I couldn’t tell you the difference between a novelization of Airport ’77 and a Jane Austen novel.” 

But he did eventually move on from the smut to the real classics: “I didn’t read Austen until I was in my late thirties, and then she was a revelation.” Now he’s obsessed, calling himself “a big set person.” At his home, he has matching sets of works by Fielding, Kipling, a 24-volume Balzac collection and “four sets of Dickens, I’m afraid.” What’s his favorite Dickens? “David Copperfield is close to my heart. I’ve read that more than all the others, including The Pickwick Papers. And I’m a big fan of The Old Curiosity Shop. I don’t even like allegory, but I think it’s a really exquisitely achieved allegory.” Craft has heard the quote attributed to Oscar Wilde that a reader “would have to have a heart of stone to read the death of [Curiosity Shop’s] little Nell without dissolving into tears...of laughter,“ but he disagrees: “I actually think it’s beautifully done.”

Craft worked at the late, lamented Stacey’s Books in San Francisco for 12 years. He’s done time at other used bookstores, and he even worked a handful of months in a corporate bookstore — “I had no emotional attachment to the place, but it did give me insights into the sale of things that happened to be books.” He can’t recall exactly how long he’s been at University Book Store — 12 or 13 years, give or take — but he knows that he helped convince management to add used books to the bookstore’s stock about a decade ago. He’s been behind the counter ever since.

Craft has been drawing since even before he could read. “My mother tells me that I drew before I talked. If she wanted me to be quiet and content, she just put a drawing implement in my hand and put me in the corner and I kept myself busy.” He started out copying John R. Neill’s illustrations from the Oz books, and even today he posts his bookish illustrations on his blog, Usedbuyer 2.0. A collection of his illustrations is for sale at University Book Store, and he sells author caricature calendars every December.

With all the talk about classics and used books, some might be surprised to learn that Craft is an avid podcaster. He’s been recording his Breakfast at the Bookstore show with Nick DiMartino for over a year now. “I’m a relatively late adopter of technology,” he admits, “but then I can become very enthusiastic.” Craft got into literary podcasts as a fan, but then he discovered that most of them were “over-specialized,” focusing only on specific subgenres of mystery, say, or certain types of science fiction. Instead, he wanted to do something a little broader, talking about all kinds of book-related topics with all kinds of guests.

Craft also headlines events at University Book Store on a regular basis. He reads Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory” every year at the holidays — this last year was his eighth performance — and he’s also celebrated the birthdays of Dickens and Thackeray with readings, as well as a celebration of the poems of William Cowper. (“That was a barn-burner, right there,” he laughs.) “It allows me to serve ham three or four times a year,” Craft says, and it provides a rare opportunity for adults to sit and be read to, which is a pleasure that too many people give up after childhood. “I just think literature is meant to be read aloud,” Craft says. “The greatest literature needs to be put into the air now and again.”

What does Craft love most about University Book Store? “Perhaps its age more than anything else,” he says. “There’s a tradition here of respect both for the customers and the employees. They really want their booksellers to have things like health insurance and a livable wage. The values clearly are from an earlier era in a lot of ways — in a lot of good ways.”

Breakfast at the Bookstore with Brad and Nick #50

For our 50th podcast, we're joined by Paul Constant of the Seattle Review of Books.

All Unmourned and Unknown

Ah, the wonders of "new media." I wrote a piece the other night, in tribute to a neighborhood bookstore that is going out of business to make way for a bank. First bookstore to hire me when we moved to Seattle, just up the street from the store where I work now. Good neighbors. We still visit. Will be missed. The piece I wrote got picked up by the local newspaper blog-of-record, and brought me an unusual number of readers, and the bookstore where I used to work some additional attention. All to the good.

The editor who linked to my post is one of the last literary gents hereabouts with any real influence, an admirable critic and reviewer, and an amiable fellow altogether. I'm glad to claim his acquaintance. He's been very kind to my brief efforts here, a good customer at the bookstore where I work, and, in my experience at his periodic shindigs/salon for the local literati, librarians, and booksellers, etc., has proved himself an excellent host. A good man, is Paul Constant.

However, in his entirely too flattering introduction to my post, he said a couple of things at which I initially took some umbrage. (Always just there for the taking, I find, but that's as I am.) Before citing what I'd written as an exception, he bemoaned "the inevitable maudlin goodbyes to bookstores that are closing" and suggested that the more usual valedictories tend to "overstate the importance of the bookshop." That last statement particularly, if specific, seemed to me perhaps a bit insensitive, and if meant generally -- as in the importance of bookshops to civilization, literature, etc. -- then downright pugnacious.

Paul is a newspaperman. A rare thing, nowadays, perhaps even rarer than a real bookseller, and as much if not more to be mourned for their passing into history. In addition, he is a genuine force for good online, as a contributor and editor at The Slog. He regularly champions, in print and online, the independent bookstore, and is always quick to note any loss in the local scene. He is not shy of the barricades.

I ought to have kept all this in mind as I read, but I'm afraid I assumed a rather alarming subtext to his comments, perhaps not immediately discernible to a less tetchy reader. Mr. Constant has made no secret of his growing impatience with the enemies of new technology, and with the blinkered nostalgia and sentimentality that tends to loudly gasp and sigh and drown-out with the gnashing of teeth, among the print-reactionaries, any and all sensible discussion of books and the ways people now buy and read them. I myself could justly be accused of having contributed something, in my own small way, to thoughtless, gloomy din now surrounding this subject. An increasingly unstable livelihood would seem to have made alarmists of us all, in the bricks-and-mortar book business. Nervous, to put it nicely. However innocent he may have been of any such implication, I thought I heard a shushing in there somewhere.

Now I've had some time to consider, I really must apologize to Paul for reading so far into what he wrote. Hardly gracious of me, under the very appreciative circumstances. I now doubt that he meant any such thing. Rather, he was perhaps, quite rightly, I think, all too gently chiding all of us with some interest in books and bookshops who have made a habit of mourning, for failing so frequently to distinguish the casualties of economics, or in this case real estate, from the general trend to The End of Civilization As We Know It.

It seems, not a sparrow falls, but the faithful see signs and wonders predicting the end of days.

The trend, it's true, at least in so far as my own prospects of a sure and comfortable retirement are concerned, are not frankly what they might once have been. Likewise, I should think, for most booksellers not tethered to a headset and a keypad somewhere in the deep, dark bowels of Amazon, though even there, there must by now be a few unquiet nights. In traditional publishing, at magazines, and newspapers, among stationers -- if such is even still an occupation legal to list on a passport -- anywhere that people earn their daily bread, and digestive-correcting-daily-yogurt, as we tend to all be getting a little older, there is an uncertainty that has made Casandras of us all. I know I am lucky to still work where I do, and intend, should things go entirely to Hell, to pin my hopes to the university's football franchise and will willingly learn to fold tee shirts, if that's what it takes to see me through to my dotage. And if there were a way to shake the loose change from a Kindle or an iPad, believe me, I'm not be too proud to shimmy like my sister, Kate.

The longer I've pondered all this tonight though, the more I've come to share Paul's point of view when it comes to the general tenor of the common bookstore obituary. Even as our old enemy, Borders Books and Music, totters on, hour to hour, refusing even now to pitch into the plot we've been tending with such anticipation for years, we independents, new and used, still rush to the bedside of any fading peddler, however remote from ourselves and what we do, and chorus the "Lacrimosa," loud and long as we can. It's become about as noisy and insincere as the paid ululation at an Irish banker's wake.

The truth is that not all bookstores deserve so many volunteers to unhitch the horses and pull the hearse. As a life-long customer and long-time bookseller, I can tell you that there are, or were anyway, as many or more bad bookstores as good. I've shopped in dozens, in cities far and wide, domestic and foreign, and I've worked in more than one. If no one remembers them now that so many are gone, that is just as it should be. Any public fuss made at the hour of their passing was wasted.

I will not name names, or speak ill of the dead, but anyone whose experience is roughly as mine will remember going into many a seedy, filthy little shop, run by illiterate junk-dealers, full of trash and frequented, as Orwell so perfectly put it in his "Bookshop Memories," by "decayed" persons "smelling of old breadcrusts." Anyone who has had to work in such holes, and for such questionable characters as Orwell's "McKechnie," from Keep the Aspidistra Flying, will admit to a shiver of traumatic recognition when first that novel was read. How these shady, rag-and-bone operations survive has always confused me. Disorganized, dirty, and cluttered with unclaimed stock, how is it their tenants pay the rent?

At the opposite end of the economy are all the fussy little parlor-shops of the snobbish antiquarian kind, where every customer off the common street is eyed disdainfully before being grudgingly admitted by a buzzer that unlocks the bolted dutch-door. When I lived in San Francisco, there was an anonymous commercial hive of these precious dealers; each with his little room, empty of all but a case of carefully soaped leather bindings, each with a tiny white paper-tag, the price so discreet as to be invisible, if no less shockingly inflated when at last deciphered. What trust-fund, or remittance-money, I've always wondered, finances these antisocial aesthetes in their sepulchral little whitenesses?

Fewer now will remember the first iteration of the blandly uniform company shops that once proliferated like mushrooms, from strip-mall to strip-mall across America, but I can still close my eyes and picture the deadly bright cheeriness that pervaded all such places; a matter of policy, devoid of any intent but moving merch come Mother's Day and Christmas. There was a time, in my rude youth, when I was dazzled just to see so many books in one place, but, having been just last year in a surviving example, the empty, antiseptic atmosphere, the underpaid, elderly lady left to run the place with no help but one bored teenager, the smell of desperation and forgetfulness, drove me from the place as from beggar's blanket display of discarded magazines. Too sad.

As to the listing retail giants who once were perfect imitations of the great bookstores, down to the deep stock of backlist fiction, leather armchairs and high shelves, that business model has long since been abandoned as unprofitable -- well before, in fact, the coming of the online merchants and the big box bulk retailers. The first branch of Borders Books and Music I was ever in was beautiful. No other word for it. For some time thereafter, every time I went into one of that company's "superstores," I made note of exactly the same definitive, three volumed edition of a standard life of Otto von Bismarck. One day, it was gone, from all of them, never to return. I would guess this happened not long after the original owners sold their company, or when it was sold again thereafter. Like their slightly healthier twin, Borders now is a just an overdecorated coffee shop, full of cheap children's remainders, loud music and brightly painted mugs, all with inspirational sayings suggestive of the superiority and sexiness of "girls" who read. Sad, really. Sadder still, the independents who would still imitate these now empty imitations with bland corporate signage, and shelves crowded with chotchkies where the books should be.

How many silly little specialty shops have I been in and passed out of speculating if, when next I pass that way, it will be a bagel-dog stand or a pet supply store? Some dear soul's dream of a Kinder Korner or Tea & Titles -- to just, I hope, make up a not too implausible sign above the belled door -- I never wish them ill, but I do wonder that the write-off for their husbands' taxes will prove worth the heartbreak.

I'll stop. Just one last word on the dozens if not hundreds of badly managed, poorly stocked, or overstocked, independents in unlikely and unprofitable places: down blind alleys, up deserted streets, tucked above dance-bars, marooned in remote woody cottages, or dockside at abandoned fun-fairs, and all, all with no better business plan than the way most of us would seem to be able to manage a mortgage. Best to look away.

And yet, for all the unmourned and unknown, there are great bookshops worth frequenting still, in every city at least worthy of the name that I've ever been in, and in many a town too. We still in the trade may be forgiven for making so much of the passing of such as these at least, I should think. I know Paul would agree.

Better of course, as doubtless Mr. Constant would insist, those of us still in the trade put away our hankies and work to keep the best of our bookshops open. He'll do his part. Best we do likewise.

The Coming of The Machine

I have seen the future, and it works -- or will, very soon. It's taken a long time, but the Espresso Book Machine, or EBM, has finally arrived at the bookstore. To say that this is an exciting development is like saying sex is a pleasurable experience. Few technological developments in my time as a bookseller have generated this much anticipation, or cost this much, or been potentially this revolutionary.

I remember when the first computerized inventory systems were being introduced into bookstores. (Yes, I am that old.) Having finally "perfected" our inventory card catalogue system in the little store I was managing at the time, and being painfully aware of the marginal profits that kept that store open, I was among the skeptics. What need had we of such technology to keep track of books? What with invoicing and manual counts and careful records... I do realize how absurd that argument sounds now. This was years after libraries and larger stores, and what was then already a major force in the market, so called "super stores," had already adopted computerized inventories. I could not see past the expense. And I wasn't wrong, entirely. That little branch store did close, not all that long after. But computers, as they had to, came in and changed everything.

Gone soon enough, or not soon enough, actually, were the heavy subscription volumes of Books in Print, the weekly microfiche envelopes from distributors, the impossibly long phone-orders to Ingram in Tennessee. (These I actually miss a little, just because of the charming Southern ladies at the other end of every call, repeating the sometimes salacious titles we ordered for a bookstore in San Francisco: "The Boys of Vaseline Alley, one copy, go ahead...") Eventually, regrettably computerized ordering made much of what our publishers' reps did for us redundant. This was the worst loss, ultimately, as publishers' reps do so much more for independent booksellers than just take orders; a whole network of personal and professional relationships, and of personalized and professional service, goes with them when reps go...

I remember too when books began to be sold online and how slow most booksellers were to embrace the Internet. My own first exposure to the Internet came in the basement of a bookstore, when a hideous green screen had to be shaded with a kind of netting to keep from burning out one's retinas, and "the world-wide web" was still primarily a vehicles for academic libraries to rather clumsily exchange information. A small group of local programmers and enthusiasts regularly met in that bookstore basement then, and one of the guys explained to me that some day very soon, that muddle of information would completely change the world. No idea what he was talking about.

Now independent bookstores -- those with enough liquid capital anyway -- have an opportunity to get in on something that I do not doubt will eventually prove to be every bit as important to the future of our business as those first computers, that blazing green screen, and the electronic "readers" and the iphones and ipods and the like that we sell in the Technology Center, upstairs.

In a recent posting by the books editor of the local Seattle weekly, "The Stranger," Paul Constant, on The Slog, wrote, with a brutal honesty born of affection, that if bookstores don't want to become completely irrelevant and or cease to exist in urban centers at least, they must embrace the changes that technology, and the desperate economy, have forced on us: selling used books with new, investing in the means of producing our own books, responding to the needs of new, more impatient customers who are unwilling to wait weeks, or in some cases, days or hours, for the book they want.

Mr. Constant is right. It is no good assuming that bookstores will simply survive because they ought. We have to do what we can to see that they do, as booksellers with not only an economic interest in books, but a sense of mission, for want of a better word, when it comes to selling books.

This then is something we can do. What the Espresso Book Machine is is the means by which, in the bookstore, we can eventually produce real books to sell ourselves. Books that otherwise require a prepaid order and at least a week's wait, so called "lightening print" books not available otherwise, can be printed and bound and sold to the customer, in most cases, in less than an hour, using this machine! These are books visually indistinguishable from their original printings, most reasonably priced, and many that would otherwise have disappeared into the limbo of the out-of-print. Local authors, self-publishing, will now have the option to do so through their local bookstore, where, for a nominal fee, they will be able see their books carried and sold. Most exciting to me, literally thousands of out-of-print titles, many available, if at all, only in rare old editions, or as restricted reading in major libraries, can now be printed and sold in affordable paperback copies and sold directly to the customers requesting them!

Think of it: all the books that Helene Hanff had to write to 84 Charing Cross Road in the sometimes vain hope of her booksellers finding affordable copies for her, can now be reprinted in minutes! I know, because the list of titles from Hanff's memoir was the first list of titles I checked for availability, and yes, they can all be had through the EBM!

One of the first books the machine's operator and our trainee in the bookstore printed was for me: a copy of Lamb's essay, A Dissertation upon Roast Pig. The covers are flatly unattractive. The copy, taken from the Harvard Library, is fouled with notes, and the copyist's thumb is clearly reproduced on every other page. (Surely the good technicians at Google might have found a better, cleaner copy -- or at least kept their fingers out of it?!) It does not matter. For eight dollars, I can provide the reader with an actual book, however imperfectly reproduced, with charming illustrations, that will be his or hers to own, of something I would otherwise have to hunt up in a used copy, if I could, or hope might someday again be reproduced in an affordable edition.

Again I ask you, just think of that!

These are early days yet. The technology, and our ability to adapt and use it, will improve. As more bookstores sign on and more publishers agree to grant access to their backlist, the number and quality of the books that will be available to readers by this means will only increase. And with this wonderful new machine, so will the chance that bookstores will go on.

I was too stupid to see the future in the past. I see it now. It is better than I could have imagined.

A Caricature

With Nounou and Nada and Nell

Back I went, tonight, to yet another gathering of the locally bookish, the latest iteration of Paul Constant's "Get Lit," this time held at the wonderful Richard Hugo House. The bar there now accepts credit cards, so a good time was had, at least by me, on a tab. The premise of these regular congresses of booksellers, journalists, librarians and authors is rather simple, the idea being that any and all that earn their living from books might and ought to get to know one another. As with any such simple idea, it seems that too many think too much about just what this might actually entail and fail to come at all for fear of being asked to do or say something. Timid creatures, it seems, the bookish. In reality, the atmosphere is so casual as to be easily mistaken for a drink after work with the usual crowd. So it is, and not a bad thing either.

I had a cocktail called a "Winter Woo Woo." It was delicious. Friends had various beers and soft-drinks, red wine and a share of the cheese and crackers at our table, as well as a bowl of wasabi peas.

Various coworkers from the bookstore, and one writer and reviewer, a great friend to us at the Used Books Desk, joined our table and we all chatted merrily enough about books, our personal lives and disappointments, the upcoming Seattle Bookfest, and various sundry other things all to do or not with books.

I stepped out a few times, to smoke and admire the boys playing soccer in the park across the street. It was a beautiful night, if already a little colder than it has been so far this October, and I was delighted to witness two handsome young men pull their wreck of a car into a very narrow parking place indeed, then step out of the car and into the cold, where they proceeded to strip down to just the thinnest T-shirts and the tightest jeans, tossing their coats and scarves behind them into the car, before shivering off down the block, presumably to the nearest dance bar. When I related this story to someone at the party inside, as an example of the ongoing commitment of gay men to fashionable discomfort, even when faced with what might have been a long cold walk back to their car, it was pointed out to me that teenage girls might well be the only other population so committed to suffering for beauty's sake. Later, starving, I stopped for a burger at Dick's and saw this observation confirmed by half a dozen nymphets with quivering, ice-white bare midriffs, all their little boyfriends sensibly bundled in coats and scarves.

The topic most on the minds of those present at Hugo House seemed to be the potential move of The Elliott Bay Book Company to new digs. This story had been first mentioned publicly by Mr Constant in The Slog, and then reproduced, and sourced rather rudely in the Seattle Times Sunday Edition, as having come from a "tabloid." Rumors of this move had evidently been circulating for some time, though I hadn't heard of it until I read Mr. Constant's piece. Before I left, some employees of that admirable bookstore came in, and the topic revived, though I don't know that anything was said on the subject that hadn't been said earlier. Evidently, those that know anything much more about this business have yet to be heard from.

I can't say that any such change of location sounds a very good thing to me, as it's present home is a lovely and welcoming space, and in my experience the only reason any such move is undertaken is usually because of financial pressures, a lost lease and such like difficulties. Everyone present clearly wished the bookstore well, but there was some discussion of the wider implications should such a linchpin of the local trade be forced into a less attractive and historic location.

Thoughts and prayers, as would be said back home, are with them.

There was one note in the conversation I did not much like. When reference was made to the somewhat excessive language in the Times story, which referred to the bookstore as "a local institution" and, as I remember it now, "an icon," not only the reporter's choice of words, but the idea of a bookstore qualifying as a landmark was dismissed as risible. "It's a business," someone present said, as if those two things were mutually exclusive, and then someone said, "It's not like we're talking about the Space Needle." The difference, to my mind, between The Elliott Bay Book Company and the Seattle Space needle is the difference between a beautiful, working, commercial and cultural venue that has served our community for better than thirty five years and a piece of, yes, iconic local kitsch. I would miss the latter, useless thing terribly should it disappear tomorrow, but the potential loss of a great independent bookstore should give all of us considerably more pause than it seemed to do in a room full of men and women who make their livings from books. Should the landscape some day soon be without such independent bookstores, great or small, the effect would be far worse, as I see it, than if the city failed to maintain it's more famous architectural follies, no? I don't remember much in the way of literature, art or poetry finding a public by way of amusement parks.

Cheating the Fiddler

I am no good at "going out." I don't like drink. I can't smoke indoors anymore. I don't have the clothes. I talk too little, then too much, then I go home.

Dorothy Parker was good at "going out," threw fine parties herself and understood how functions function, as it were, and, for a time at least, she went where she was asked, drank what she was handed and danced with the fellows who asked her, famously claiming to have ended up, time and again, if not under the table, then "under the host." If, in reality, she was never the "party girl" she describes so pathetically in her most famous story "Big Blond," she certainly got around. She quite got the spirit of the thing:

On Cheating The Fiddler

"Then we will have tonight!" we said.
"Tomorrow- may we not be dead?"
The morrow touched our eyes, and found
Us walking firm above the ground,
Our pulses quick, our blood alight.
Tomorrow's gone- we'll have tonight!

I have never quite felt so. I married young, at sweet 19, for love among many reasons, it must be said, and not the least of which may well have been to be excused forever thereafter from "going out." Freshman year in college, a gang of friends, gorgeous actors and dancers all, took pity on me once, and made of me a "project." They did my hair, as best they could. They dressed me in tight, acid-washed jeans, pointed boots, eye-liner, etc., (It was the eighties, my dears.) They taught me to accept drinks when offered, to make only the smallest of talk, even to dance a little in a way less likely to embarrass my sponsors. Having made me over, they took me out. The dance bar in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to which we then repaired was called the "Pegasus Lounge" -- still there it seems -- and, after a bit of an orgy on the dance floor, to loosen me up, I was parked on a bench next to a handsome, older man. I did not know it, but this poor soul had agreed to be my blind-date. My good faeries left me there, nursing a 7&7, and flew back to the dancing. Time passed, as it will in a bar when one is underage, and eventually my friend Jimmy came to check on my progress. Signs were good; my "date" and I seemed to be in close conference on the bench. But dropping lightly down next to me, Jimmy discovered, over the din of Cyndie Lauper, that I had reduced the man to tears. Straightaway thereafter he fled, never to be seen again. All astonishment, Jimmy asked me what on earth I'd done to the man. I explained that he was feeling rather fragile as his mother had only just had a hysterectomy and he was very concerned for her recovery. Seems I'd violated one of the essential rules of "going out" and dragged the man into serious conversation. I was declared "hopeless" by Jimmy and the rest of the crew, and left largely thereafter to see to myself.

"Only you," said Jimmy, unkindly, "could turn a trick's thoughts to the terrors of maternal gynecology at midnight on a Saturday!"

Having "gone out" again tonight, against my better judgement, and if only to a gathering of the bookish called "Get Lit," hosted by the charming literary editor, Paul Constant, of the newspaper, The Stranger, I am happy to report nobody fled in tears. That though, is the full extent of my triumph. The party was intimate to begin with, I having arrived far too early. I walked in, saw six people in name-tags at a table by the bar, fled to the WC, and then slipped out for a fortifying burrito at a taco-stand down the street. I immediately regretted not having brought a book to read with my dinner, but no matter. Having eaten and strolled the neighborhood again, I stepped into a sex shop and goggled for a bit, before bucking up and returning to my scheduled evening "out." When I came back there were a few more people than there had been when I fled. (No one was so unkind as to ask if I hadn't been in briefly just an hour before.) A heated discussion of new technology was ongoing when I took a name-tag and sat down. A charming young novelist, in a stylish short-brimmed hat, was being chatted up on the subject by local booksellers, including V., with whom I'd once appeared on a panel discussion after a showing of Alex Beckstead's excellent documentary, "Paperback Dreams." Dear V. was, as usual, awfully clever and well informed. The mood was surprisingly light, the conversation interesting. I sat listening and sipping my glass of box-wine, until I yielded to the urge to chime-in. Mistake. I blessedly don't recall the full extent of my participation, but I do know that, at some point, I told the young author of literary fiction he might well have to choose between his forthcoming first child and writing novels of seven hundred pages. Oh dear. Then I believe, having driven a few good people from the table, I argued the importance of used books with poor V., who did not in fact disagree me, himself being a buyer. ?!

By the end of my evening, having thoroughly bored the good wife of our host, and having failed to introduce myself to anyone I did not already know, I latched on to the bookstore's vivacious director of promotions and events, Stesha Brandon, and let her do the donkey's work of including me in such conversations as into which I might unbidden intrude. Bless her. Stesha is a dazzler at a party. I warmed in her reflecting glow as long as I might and then, again and finally, fled.

I came home to my husband, fresh brownies, and the comfort of dear Dorothy Parker's poems, perhaps in the vain hope of, if not learning how to "go out," at least the right attitude for "staying in." Here then, a moving example of Dorothy's art:

A Certain Lady

Oh, I can smile for you, and tilt my head,
And drink your rushing words with eager lips,
And paint my mouth for you a fragrant red,
And trace your brows with tutored finger-tips.
When you rehearse your list of loves to me,
Oh, I can laugh and marvel, rapturous-eyed.
And you laugh back, nor can you ever see
The thousand little deaths my heart has died.
And you believe, so well I know my part,
That I am gay as morning, light as snow,
And all the straining things within my heart
You'll never know.

Oh, I can laugh and listen, when we meet,
And you bring tales of fresh adventurings, --
Of ladies delicately indiscreet,
Of lingering hands, and gently whispered things.
And you are pleased with me, and strive anew
To sing me sagas of your late delights.
Thus do you want me -- marveling, gay, and true,
Nor do you see my staring eyes of nights.
And when, in search of novelty, you stray,
Oh, I can kiss you blithely as you go ....
And what goes on, my love, while you're away,
You'll never know.