Where Do We Get Our Books?
From the brackish waters of the Chesapeake to the rich soil of the Blue Ridge
People walk in all the time and want to know where we got all these books (about 26,000 in the shop as of January 1). The short answer is, “all over the place.” But that doesn’t really satisfy most people’s curiosity so today we will be pulling back the veil to reveal how we keep our bookshop full and our inventory fresh.
Many of our books are sourced not very far away, sustainably harvested from book reefs found off the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay. The brackish water cultivates a sweeter genre of book, and most of our modern romance, Beverly Cleary, and titles like Eat, Pray, Love, come from this unique source. The occasional pearl, like Diary of a Wimpy Kid or The Alchemist, sometimes blooms off the reef as well, usually in late February or early March, before the warming waters signal the start of book mating season and things get a little more touch-and-go. Over-harvesting has become a real problem in the last hundred years, and between April and September we are barred from harvesting books from the reef in order to allow it to replenish its bounty.
For a more salt-of-the-earth read, like the early espionage novels of John Le Carré, the deep investigative biographies of Robert Caro, or anything in the Nordic noir genre, we have to get a little more creative. For these we actually have to take our pig, confusingly also named Aaron (a third Aaron, guys? really?) out to the forests of the Shenandoah Valley at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains not too far from Front Royal. Aaron the pig can detect a cache of Henning Mankel novels as deep as 15 cm below ground.
For a lot of our good modern lit, like Colson Whitehead, Amy Tan, and Celeste Ng, these actually come from our book cave in the bowels of a hangar in Hyattsville, Maryland, where they are usually aged for a couple of years before becoming ripe enough for the shop. A lot of our stock may appear dusty and finger-soiled, but that’s actually part of the aging process. Trying to erase this layer is like removing the icing from a cake.
Finally there are the great Russian novels of the 19th century, the door stoppers of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. These grow out of a rain barrel we store outside our hangar. Usually we start with just a few short stories by Chekhov, a copy of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, and a huge heap of sea salt. Stir this occasionally for the next six weeks and eventually you’ll find yourself rich with the millions of words that make up the Kareninas and Karamazovs that we all crave and that our brain biome needs to stay healthy and regular.
And finally, when people move or downsize or pass away, they or their families call us in, and we buy their books if they’re any good. We supplement these with library book sales, book fairs, and scouting other shops whenever we travel. Also we order our new books from Penguin/Random House and Ingram.
-LNG