One of our fair city’s happiest features is the number and quality of its independent book shops. (And antique malls and art galleries and bars dispensing locally brewed ale, but they’re another topic altogether.)
Depending on the owners’ inclinations and interests, these shops provide for bargain hunters (lots of scruffy secondhand paperbacks), antiquarians (noble, venerable volumes on topics few persons write about these days), specialists (cooks, watercolorists, sailors, francophiles), and even people who just love reading a good story on paper, not electrons. I’m very fond of all of them, and do love browsing on a showery afternoon — it keeps me out of the hot-chocolate bars.
So you will not be surprised that my attention was caught by a newsy clipping about books a good friend gave me a few months back. And not just because it was an actual cutting from a genuine paper newspaper, either.
Orca Books, a close-to-perfect Olympia bookshop (the resident cat puts a heavy paw on the scale of my judgment), was “going co-op.” This did not mean it was going to start selling bulk quinoa or bean coffee (we have actual food co-ops for that). Rather, it was encouraging Olympians to pony up a bit of cash to form a co-op to run the store and keep the owner from going straight to a Dickensian poor-house.
“Orca Books offers the community a chance to keep an anchor institution downtown that helps define Olympia’s identity,” said John McNamara
Read more here.
I immediately ran over and signed up. Good things don’t flourish without a little water, some fertilizer, and a shot of Milk of Human Kindness. (See aforementioned cocoa.)
So when I found myself wondering where else An Abecedarium of Ornaments could find an enthusiastic readership, Orca Books was very high on my list.
I ankled on over, and the kind lady behind the counter was prepared to agree. Which means you can now find the Ornament Book on an actual, brick-and-mortar, bookshop shelf. Sensibly parked on the one marked “Local authors.”