McHuston Booksellers

Rare, Collectible, & Otherwise

Tag: book stores (Page 106 of 113)

Cheesy changes.

October 13, 2012 /

You know what they say about change… Keep it! (I’m kidding. I don’t think anyone ever says “Keep the change” except in the movies.) The old saying is something like – there is nothing constant, but change. It’s a froo-froo way of pointing out that we can’t really rely on things being the same as they were last week.

It’s the same with the lunchtime menu.

The items have been changed out a couple of times already, and I’ve mentioned to folks that the cardstock menu is just temporary since I don’t want to pay to etch it in stone (or lamination) until I’m relatively certain that they are the right things at the right price.

A couple of items have been bumped. Not that there was anything wrong with the food, but since I’m still the head chef, line cook, waiter, busboy, and dishwasher – it is important that anything being offered is easy to plate up and serve. (A party of six had me worried, but the majority ordered Irish stew, of which I am a master ladler. (Spellchecker didn’t flag that as a made up word, so perhaps there is a user of ladles called such…)

The grilled chicken is gone. There won’t be a lot of lamenting among you, I know, because it was among the least ordered items on the menu. In its place is a grilled three-cheese: it is nothing fancy, but plenty tasty on the grilled Irish loaf and on the inexpensive end of the price line. The corned beef and Swiss sandwich no longer features slaw atop the sliced meat. I was trying to achieve a Reuben-like sandwich without grilling sauerkraut (which produces a distinct aroma that books love to absorb). I thought the slaw might substitute, but I didn’t care for it after all. The sandwich works as a kraut-less Reuben and is still delicious.

I’ve also fine-tuned some obvious (or should have been obvious) errors, like leaving off the price for a cup ($3.95) or bowl ($5.95) of soup. Oops.

The hours for the food service are still limited. I want to run with it, but I’m still at the crawl/walk stage. The 11:30am to 1:30pm window covers most folk’s lunch hour and gives me plenty of time to get my dishwashing apron a workout afterward.

Good Book! Good Gosh!

October 4, 2012 /

Salvation is a lot more expensive than it used to be!

One of the online book sales consortiums releases its priciest sales once a month, and for September, the Good Book brought a heavenly price for the seller. The hand-tooled bible is old enough that Christopher Columbus could have taken it along on his voyage to the new world.

Printed in 1491, the so-called “Poor Man’s Bible” sold through American Book Exchange for $26,200. Obviously, it isn’t a poor man’s bible any longer, but at the time of its printing, this volume was among the first published in a much smaller and less ornate binding – more affordable for the common man.

Several Bibles made the top 10 of ABE’s most expensive books sold, but the top fiction honors went to a first edition copy of Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women.” The 19th century volume brought $25,000 in a private sale.

Nowhere near that price, but an interesting book just the same is an 1883 German language bible we have in the shop currently with a binding that looks like it was carved from the trunk of an oak tree. The heavy volume is filled with beautiful engravings as seen in the accompanying image.

Some of the earliest Bibles printed in America were done in Western Pennsylvania, where German immigrants settled at the invitation of William Penn. Publishers in the region continued to print in the German language to accommodate the large settlements in Chester and Lancaster counties that still relied on their native tongue. Obviously, the use of German was prevalent enough to require the publishing of German language books well after the Civil War.

Somehow, one of the Good Books from that area found its way to Indian Territory, and eventually Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, where it proudly sits anticipating its 130th birthday.

Rolling your eyes: is there a button for that?

September 17, 2012 /

My eleven-year-old did something this morning he’d never done before: he rolled down the car window. The morning fog had settled all over the glass and I couldn’t see the passenger-side mirror.

“Do I just move it this way?” he asked, pointing to the hand crank. After I nodded, he flew to the task and worked the glass down and back up, clearing off the collected condensation that was blocking my vision.

When I bought the car, I searched for one that had manual door locks and windows, having had multiple bad experiences with electric motors and switches. As a kid growing up, I’d missed most of the fancy Johnny-come-lately options installed in the more expensive cars. On the other hand, he’d never been in a car that DIDN’T have a button to push for just about everything. The first time he’d seen me crank down the driver’s window, he laughed and asked me what I was doing – that flurry of arm and elbow activity threw him for a loop.

The task must have been undertaken in some other manner in the really “old days,” or else I suppose I would have asked him to “crank” the window. As a society, I don’t think we do a lot of cranking anymore. I have no idea how it came to be called “rolling the window down” in our family. There isn’t a lot of rolling involved. These days, it’s mostly the rolling of eyes at the idea of manually moving a car window up or down.

Car windows aren’t the only thing, I suppose. Teachers still explain how to tell time on an analog clock, but I wonder – for how long? The skills needed to type on a manual typewriter are unknown to a significant percentage of Americans, who will never in their lives need to know what the carriage-return bell signifies or how to set the tab-stops. How many younger folks have ever been confronted by a telephone that had a rotary dial instead of buttons?

Some of the old skills still apply, at least to some degree. I’ve had cashiers count back change the old-fashioned way, beginning with the total due and adding the coinage and dollars until they reached the amount of the bill presented. The majority simply let the cash register display the change due, and hand the pile over while announcing the amount.

Progress renders one set of skills important and others obsolete.

Concerning books, the lessons about how to turn pages are so simple as to be understood. Downloading an eBook onto a Kindle or Nook – now that’s another thing.

And I’d never be so foolish as to challenge an eleven year old to a videogame competition.

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