McHuston Booksellers

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Today’s Business? Snow way to tell…

February 20, 2013 / / 0 Comments

I am comforted. At least, I suppose that’s how I should feel after eating comfort food. After whipping up some mashed taters, I treated myself to a cupful.

When you work alone, you may find yourself doing knucklehead things like preparing enough mashed potatoes for an army on a snow day that is liable to scare off any hint of lunchtime business. There was no one else here to say, Hey! That’s a lot of potatoes. Maybe you want to scale back a little.

By myself in the shop, I can sample my finished product and render my verdict.

Me, spoon in hand: Mmmm. That’s a tasty potato.

As you know, things are a little more casual when talking to yourself, and that may be much the case today due to the snow. It is midmorning and still the snow is falling heavily here in Broken Arrow. It makes me think of that grand snowfall we had a few years ago, when the drifts were deep enough to stop my car in the parking lot.

In my seven years on Main Street, that was the only day I failed to sell a book. Being an optimist, I assumed someone out there would have a book emergency and I wanted to be ready to handle it. After several hours organizing and tidying up, I locked up and worked to get the car unstuck.

This morning, I snapped a couple of shots of the storefront. One was a few minutes after the snow began in earnest and was already obscuring the lettering on the awning. Later, it was coming down hard enough that I didn’t want to venture back out.

Can you tell in the front door image what is wrong?

Hint: Click on the image for a larger view, then look at the letters on the bank’s front wall. Compare them with the lettering on the bookstore’s front door lettering.

Naturally, I’m going to flip the picture to my own advantage!

Happy Snow Day, and I hope you have your own cup of comfort food to fall back on!

McHuston Booksellers in the Rose District
122 South Main Street, Broken Arrow, OK

Ready for all snow book emergencies!

MASHED POTATO UPDATE: It turned out to be a Shepherd’s Pie kind of day, and that mountain of spuds is gone!

Approaching the 300th Birthday…

February 19, 2013 /

Here’s how old this book is: When it was published in Paris, Benjamin Franklin was still alive and living in the American colonies. He was eight years old.

1714 was the year that King George I ascended the throne. He was the king of Great Britain and Ireland, although he was born in Hanover (now in Germany, but back then it was the Kingdom of Hanover – sort of like the Land of Oz). The King’s English was different in that time, too: the King spoke German.

In the American Colonies – there weren’t yet thirteen, as South Carolina had not been formally recognized as a royal colony (1729), and in 1714, tea was introduced for the first time. It was unsweetened, just so you know.

There were not a lot of novels being published in the colonies in 1714; in fact, it wasn’t until young B. Franklin grew up that the first truly successful newspaper was first printed – his Pennsylvania Gazette in 1728. It is true that a printing press was brought from Europe in the 1630s to be set up at Cambridge, Massachusetts, where a few books were published over the years, but most colonists were just struggling to survive and didn’t have a lot of free time to kick back with an adventure story.

In fact, through the 1600s it is fair to say the publishing was conducted primarily by Cambridge’s Samuel Green, William Bradford in Philadelphia, and Maryland’s William Nuthead. (Don’t you know he suffered for his surname?) Any book printed at the time would be expensive to acquire, and the contents were confined to religious reading and almanacs. People listed books in their wills to specify who should receive which volume.

The little book in the image (you can click the picture for a larger view) is about the size of a church hymnal, and from my failing high school French, the title page appears to indicate the contents are Moral Reflections with Notes on the New Testament. Light, after-dinner reading. For a book approaching its 300th birthday, it is in surprisingly good shape. In fact, its in great shape compared to a lot of used hardbacks that come into the shop.

As with many religious books of the 17th through the 19th centuries, the artwork consists of line engravings, since photography as we know it did not exist until the mid-1800s.

I can’t say what the book cost when it first rolled off the printing press in Paris, that day in 1714, but at the modest (relatively speaking) price it is tagged with here in the bookshop – adjusted for inflation – it would have cost a colonist about $23. Compare that with the $13 dollars that would have been spent for a brand new Brown Bess smooth bore musket.

Little surprise that – for the price – muskets easily outsold anything offered in a leather binding with paper pages in between!

Killer Queen.

February 13, 2013 /

Sunshine. Blue skies. Looking down the sidewalk, I see a number of my merchant neighbors with their doors propped open, enjoying the scant breeze. I don’t mind the cliché about the weather in Oklahoma, you know – the one that advises those who don’t like the weather here to just wait a minute. It’s refreshing – in every sense of the word – to have a rainy, dreary day that was topped off with a brief snowfall followed by such a bright day that it might be the meteorological opposite of its predecessor.

So nice outside, it compelled me to grab the spray bottle and wash the front door glass. So nice outside, it called for a new snapshot of the storefront. It’s a regular play-hooky day, but I better stay put for those book emergencies that pop up of an afternoon.

Since I was here instead of playing outdoors, I was able to field a question:

Nice lady: How does this work?

Me, holding a book: This front part opens, revealing the words inside, fresh and ready for reading.

I’m kidding. A lot of folks wonder about the mechanics of a used book store and things like trade credit. The nice lady had come across a tag inside one of the books that stated: Not available for Trade Credit.

Unlike some used book stores, most books here at the shop go out as a result of a cash or credit card transaction. I have a few trade accounts, although not too many. My selling rationale is pretty simple: If I pay cash for a book, I have to sell it for cash. The light company won’t take used books to settle the monthly utility bill. And there it is.

There is a great selection of the inventory available for those who bring in used books, and there are no policies here that are etched in stone.

Some feature selections – those books propped up on easels or displayed in the cases in the front of the shop – are also reserved for non-trade transactions. Some are new, unread copies. Others are harder-to-find, collectible, or specialty items. The set in the image is an example. The volumes are beautifully bound and kept, with ornate gilt embossing.

The set is edited by Ellery Queen, but of course they weren’t really. There wasn’t really an Ellery Queen. Two cousins from Brooklyn made up the character and then used the persona as a penname to write detective stories. Keep up here: the character Ellery Queen is a mystery writer and editor. In the stories. In real life, the Ellery Queen on the spine of the books was the pseudonym of Daniel Nathan and his cousin Manford Lepofsky.

You can see why they chose to write under a different name.

In this ten volume set, the fictional editor has selected classic detective stories from different eras and a range of authors and set them off in a fine-binding affair that certainly stands out in a bookcase.
Great stories. Fantastic price.

No mystery about that.

McHuston Booksellers & Irish Bistro: in the Rose District
122 South Main Street, Broken Arrow, Oklahoma

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