Hopeful shopping

Oct. 22, 2011
Photo by Deirdre Schoo for The New York Times

Last week the New York Times' Thursday Styles section profiled bookstore owner Sarah McNally, who owns "the determinedly WiFi-free McNally Jackson Books on Prince Street in Nolita." It was a really enjoyable read, and here are a few reasons why:

  • The Espresso Book Machine

    • Had you ever heard of this? I hadn't, but it's amazing. It's a machine that prints any book on demand, and McNally Jackson Books has the only one in New York City (there are only 80 worldwide.) It has seven million titles available on it, and it prints each book in a matter of minutes.

    The machine can cost more than $100,000, a huge investment for an independent bookstore, but it makes sense when the NYT describes it as "Ms. McNally's grand gambit against the e-book pestilence." I also loved this description:

    Ms. McNally gazed tenderly at the behemoth as it printed 'Veiled Women,' by Marmaduke Pickinthall (1913) for a customer. "Look," she cooed, as mechanical thingamabobs measured and bound the new book. "It's still warm, like cookies fresh out of the oven."

  • She's kooky in a good way

    And the profile is full of little tidbits as evidence. To wit:

    She sipped tea, coughing, her thin body shaking. Bad cold? "Technically, I had tuberculosis," she said with a shrug.

  • The psychology of book buying

    • I always think of aspirational shopping as purchasing a fancy pair of shoes that don't fit into your lifestyle, a pair of jeans that are too snug, or a luxury car you can't quite afford. But buying books can be similar in that it represents the kind of person you hope to be, knowledge you hope to have in the future. I never thought of it that way until I read this: 

    "I believe that within every great reader there are multitudes of people," she said... Book buying is aspirational, she added. "They are deeply hopeful purchases."
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    Come on, come out

    March 2, 2011


    "    Spend the day outside communing with nature. Seriously.     It's like pushing a reset button on your mind and wiping out the crazy.    "

    -Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin in the Skinny Bitch series (which I picked up at the library but don't exactly recommend, although it has its moments.)


    I'm a firm believer in the crazy-erasing effect of spending any decent amount of time outside, whether it's a day-long hike in the rainforest or a 20 minute walk down a tree-lined street (which is how I came to take this photo.)

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    Mars and Venus in interviews

    Feb. 21, 2011
    "Well, first off, don't interview a guy if a woman is available. Guys don't notice anything. I probably asked twenty of DiMaggio's teammates about the party after the 1947 World Series at the Waldorf-Astoria. And they'd say, 'Aw it was great! There was a band and everything was first-class. Joe was real happy that night!'

    Then I'd ask one of their wives to describe the party. And she'd say, 'Yes, it was a wonderful party. But the flowers were dreadful. And the food was late. And Phil Risutto's mother came in wearing the oddest hat...'

    They know everything. Guys are hopeless.    "

    --from the chapter on Richard Ben Cramer in The New New Journalism, in which top-notch nonfiction writers are interviewed about their work habits. I bought it last week for $6 on the discount shelf at Dog Eared Books, and it's been a pretty good read! It's kind of like Coders at Work for journalists.

    I've definitely found there are differences in what men and women tend to remember, but I wouldn't say that one gender is better to interview than the other-- the information you get is just different. I've been exasperated at my husband many a time when trying to get details on something emotional or interpersonal ("They broke up? What happened? Well, what did he say? You didn't ask?") but he's amazing at remembering, say, how many miles per gallon his car could get in high school.

    It's not surprising that women would have the dirt on what a party was really like-- but I bet every one of those men interviewed could remember the final scores of all seven games of that year's World Series, and lots of them could still give a pretty mean play-by-play.
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    "Let yourself be inert"

    Sept. 9, 2010

    From Marcel Proust's 1907 letter to his friend Georges de Lauris, regarding the recent death of his mother:

    "Now there is one thing I can tell you: you will enjoy certain pleasures you would not fathom now. When you still had your mother you often thought of the days when you would have her no longer. Now you will often think of days past when you had her.

    When you are used to this horrible thing, that she will forever be cast into the past, then you will gently feel her revive, returning to take her place, her rightful place, beside you. At the present time, this is not yet possible.

    Let yourself be inert, wait until the incomprehensible power ... that has broken you restores you a little, I say 'a little' because henceforth you will always keep something broken about you. Tell yourself this, too, for it is a kind of pleasure to know that you will never love less, that you will never be consoled, that you will constantly remember more and more."

    *this translation I took mostly from the September 13 issue of the New Yorker, which has a really touching compilation of Roland Barthes' notes on mourning. I changed a few words of the translation after finding the original letter in French here.
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