Sigh No More, Ladies

One of the most enjoyable parts of working the card and gift area of this here Brookline Booksmith is opening up all the boxes of new merchandise we carry in the store. Sure, it is coupled with the time-consuming and sometimes tedious task of putting the little price stickers on each item--but it's also sort of like Christmas every time we get something especially cool. And just two days ago, ladies and gentlemen, we got some especially awesome new merchandise.

We warmly welcome the fabulous bath and beauty products from fantastic company Blithe and Bonny. These hand-crafted and amazingly scented products include goat's milk soap bars, bath salts, dish soaps, bubble bath, candles, body lotions, soaps shaped like bees, soaps shaped like roses... and they all smell AMAZING. With fragrances like Jasmine, Rose, Honey Almond, Lavender, Eucalyptus Mint (!) and more, there's pretty much something for everyone. Also, dish towels.

I'm one of those wimpy people who is sensitive to strong fragrances, but these lovely bath and beauty products, while still quite pleasant, are not overly strong; even after several hours handling boxes of soaps and candles, I hadn't sneezed once. Instead I 'm pretty sure my brain became encased in happy smells that may have made me a bit more giddy at the whole situation than is considered normal...

On top of the glorious scents, Blithe and Bonny uses awesomely innovative, eco-friendly packaging. Dish soaps and bubble baths are packaged in repurposed wine bottles; the dish towels are wrapped in what appears to be cardboard tubes from paper products. And if you hadn't noticed already, each label is made from the page of an old book. How perfect is that?

While admiring all this awesome merchandise, I inspected one of the designs of the lovely flour sack dish towels we carry: a mermaid with a poem from Shakespeare's "Much Ado About Nothing." It reads as follows:

Sigh no more, ladies, sigh nor more;
    Men were deceivers ever;
One foot in sea and one on shore,
    To one thing constant never;
        Then sigh not so,
        But let them go,
    And be you blithe and bonny;
Converting all your sounds of woe
    Into. Hey nonny, nonny.

In the play, the poem goes on:

Sing no more ditties, sing no mo,
    Or dumps so dull and heavy;
The fraud of men was ever so,
    Since summer first was leavy.
        Then sigh not so,
        But let them go,
    And be you blithe and bonny,
Converting all your sounds of woe
    Into. Hey, nonny, nonny.

Now, if you've ever seen this particular Shakespeare play, you know that the plot involves some sullen jerk who decides to mess with everybody's happiness by tricking the lovestruck Claudio into believing his fiancee has been unfaithful. The trick works, and the enraged Claudio abandons the heartbroken (and confused) Hero on the alter, accusing her of lechery. Now, when you consider the plot in relation to this little poem here, something doesn't quite make sense. Basically, the song (as song by some unimportant page at a garden party or something) basically says this: Men are unfaithful jerks, but there's nothing you can do about it, so stop complaining and accept it--replace those sad songs with "hey, nonny nonny" (Shakespeare-tongue for "what the heck").

Wait a second. So men can go around and do whatever they want and women are supposed to just deal? A bit of a double standard, considering what poor Hero went through just because her fiancee suspected that she wasn't being true (without giving her a chance to defend herself, of course). Unfortunately, this is something to which ladies today can still relate. Christina Aguilera has a song that basically says the same thing, although a little less eloquently than old Will Shakespeare. While great strides have, indeed, been made towards women's equality, this is one area that seems all too unchanged since Much Ado About Nothing premiered back in circa 1598. Not to say that this isn't an awesome play (I enjoy it thoroughly), but it is something that does make us ladies sigh.

So, I propose an alternative translation to Shakespeare's poem: Men can be jerks (and should be held accountable when they are), so instead of just accepting it and/or sitting in your room singing "Unbreak My Heart," screw 'em; brush it off and take a nice bubble bath, accompanied by some amazing Blithe and Bonny bath products. Hopefully now, you'll be sighing not in frustration but in sweet, fragrant relaxation.

Destination: Where???

You may have notice the books on our shelves traveling over the past week. We have been making some exciting changes, all to benefit our browsers. If you can't find your favorite section, we'll be happy to show you its new home.

Destination Literature has found a new--well, destination--and is now integrated with our travel guides in aisle two. We'll be bringing our wall maps upstairs and keeping everything you need to plan your next trip in one place, so the only traveling you do is the travel you planned. Think of it as a one stop shop.

So, if you're looking for a guide to Venice, you can find Rick Steve's Venice 2012 next to Joseph Brodsky's meditations on the city in his elegant travelogue Watermark.

If you're traveling to Australia we have Fodor's Australia in full color sharing a shelf with Bill Bryson's classic In a Sunburned Country and Gail Jones' new novel Five Bells.

Going to London? You can pick up Emerson's English Traits, Craig Taylor's new Londoners, and Fodor's 25 Best London, and a Streetwise London map all in one trip!

We love to hear where you're going and to help you find the books that will guide you there. Last weekend a customer traveling to Thailand to visit her grandchildren stopped by to pick up a Thai phrasebook. "I'm going to visit friends in Nebraska before Thailand," she told me, wondering what could prepare her for the open skies and home-baked culture of the Midwest. She left the store well prepared for foreign lands, with Lonely Planet's Thai Phrasebook and Willa Cather's My Antonia tucked under arm. Let us know your travel plans and we'll help you find the literature--both practical and imaginative--you need to prepare for your next trip.

Happy Travels!

Good Question

Trying to figure out something to say about this book, I scrolled through the customer reviews on Website-That-Will-Not-Be-Named, and I was surprised to find the biggest complaint people had about the memoir was it's disjointed, nebulous nature. A few people who gave the book only one or two stars said they enjoyed Didion's other work, but felt perhaps she was too close to the reality of this story to really tell it correctly and succinctly.

For those of you that don't know, Joan Didion's newest book, Blue Nights, is the disjointed, nebulous autobiographical narrative about her daughter, Quintana Roo, who died unexpectedly at the age of 39. The book is at once easy to read and extraordinarily difficult; for me, reading Didion's prose is not so much reading as it is listening to a cool voice speak inside my head. I see her thoughts so clearly, through whatever magic it is she wields; maybe we are just cosmic brethren, I'm not sure, but I am certainly stricken by it. However, it is this same cool voice that can also reach inside your heart and crush the dust out of it. In talking about the memories and death of her daughter (and husband, for that matter), one can visualize with crystalline detail her pain and confusion, her resolution in being the last remaining member of her family.

So what I would have to ask those people on WTWNBN, is, how else does one tell a story about that? What memories can you consult that will not lead you down a meandering path of recollection? I know it is an author's job to wrangle time and space into a consumable a form, but how can you when the nature of your despair is almost unnameable? Didion peppers her book with details; specific names of flowers, playmates, luxurious vacation spots and the layout of each house stayed in. These names and experiences jump around in time; Quintana is occasionally in her 20's, but it's not long before she is wearing a plaid school girl jumper and disappearing down a hill on her own. 

Memory is not stored in sequence. Could Didion have written this book any other way, and should she have? This book might not be about the shared experience of losing the person of Quintana Roo, but about Didion's experience of losing her daughter, and the process by which she continues to exist on earth without being crippled by woe. Didion discusses her own frailty, her owning aging as well, citing several doctors she visits and ailments she collects after she turns 75. This is also a story about her, about entropy. I suppose what my real question is, how do you detail a life, and then how do you detail the experience of mourning that life?

I don't know. It's a good question.

Sole Collector

Used bookshops are the coolest places on the planet. Where else can you find:

• $20 in a Dean Koontz book
• Photos of dog psychologists inside books
• A past-edition of Perfume by Patrick Süskind that doesn't have a chick-lit cover
• The lone, rare copy of Cubisme to complete your Les Maitres set of French art books?

Only in used book shops! Where people bring their rare, cool, out-of-print books and we sell them to you dirt cheap.

It's a cool place to start up collections, too, of things you didn't know you needed. I personally am a Penguin fangirl, and this job keeps me stocked in all kinds of great volumes. I like the old ones with the orange and white horizontal belts, but maybe you should start up a collection of the Penguin Modern Classics mass markets  printed in the 60s in the UK. Observe yesterday's acquisition:

 And we usually get a couple every other week or so. Steady supply for a collector's demand.

Or how about the rough and edgy illustrated Vintage mass markets designed by Edward Gorey? There are a ton and even a few imitators, this would be a great collection to start up, and would really impress both friends and professors when you host brunches in your spare Allston digs.

Or how about another personal favorite of mine, that we seem to get in pretty regularly: 1960s-ish Signet Classic mass markets, with the coolest illustrated covers on the planet:

Any of these individual volumes will run you $2.50-4 a pop, not a bad amount to drop every once in a while, and definitely worth it to feed the thrill of the hunt!

We even have things to satisfy the collector who likes to collect in huge swaths. Just yesterday we acquired 10 volumes of the tiny 1950 French art books Les Maitres, as well as a cool non-fiction series of middle school social studies books printed in the 70s.

Stop on in and see what collection awaits you!

How to Have a Rockin' Dinner Party

If you're reading this blog, it most likely means that you are some sort of musical and/or culinary wizard who holds the stout belief in infusing everything around you with the power of ROCK. Sure, you can paper your walls with posters and make intricately cut city silihouette clocks out of your old records...but you know what's way cooler? Cooking with guitars. Yeah, that's right. Think it's impossible? THINK AGAIN.

 BAM. That's right, we have not one, but three types of guitar-shaped spatulas for you to use for your various culinary endeavors. For pancakes, omelettes, or musical-themed cookies, use the Flipper; whip up batter for the most metal of cakes with the Guitar Baking Spatula. Each of these food-safe silicone spatulas come in three rockin' colors: Cool Blue, Hellfire Red and Blacker than the Blackest Black Times Inifinity. Then we have the BBQ Guitar Spatula, which you can use over the fiery pits of your grill to make the most metal of steaks, hot dogs, and veggie-burgers.

While your bandmates and other rockstar buddies are waiting for you to compose your epic meal, serve them their favorite beverages with some rockin' ice cubes, shaped like guitars and music notes. Got your goth-rock friends over too? Keep their drinks dead-cold with Bone Chillers ice cubes. Or maybe you're more of a hip-hop type of person? Try some ice-cold boombox cubes for your drink. Don't forget to use your record coasters; everyone knows water stains are simply not metal.

While cooking with the power of rock, make sure you can take the heat; use these silicone record pot-holders to protect your hands from hot pots and pans. And don't think the seemingly dull task of mixing can stop the rock: no, with these Mix Stix, you can keep practicing your sweet drum solo when you're not using them for that sweet meal you're making. Making a pizza? Shred that cheese with The Shredder cheese grater, and slice it up in style with the Fresh Slice record player pizza-cutter.

Now on to dinnertime! Serve your deliciously musical meal on these record-shaped placemats; when you're not eating off them, use them to practice your DJ skills! I'm sure that you probably already have plenty of ornate knives and other brutal utensils to cut into that juicy steak (I've substituted our kids' Constructive Eating cutlery; but if you went the route of Vegan Black Metal Chef and made some metal Pad Thai, consider using a pair of Beat It! drum/chopsticks for your rockin' meal.

By now, you're probably wondering if this is all the rock-themed items we offer for your most musical of dinner parties. The answer: Never! After dinner, even the task of washing the dishes can rock when you wear the Tuff Dish dishwashing gloves, which keep your hands dry and your black nailpolish unchipped, while still making you look like a badass. Your bandmates can keep busy by playing a game of cards with the Mixed Deck retro playing card deck, while sipping some coffee (black, of course) from this brutal Fisticup brass-knuckles mug. If you or your friends brought their rockstar-in-the-making kids, keep them busy with this adorable little drum. It'll amuse them for hours AND keep them in practice for their next gig.

 If anyone had ever doubted what a culinary rockstar you are, they will doubt no longer; for you are clearly the Rockin' King or Queen of the Kitchen.

Maybe not as intense as this guy, but still.

 

All of our music-themed kitchenwares and other goodies can be found the Card and Gift Room's kitchenwares section, or with the gift items in Aisle 4 near our cookbooks. Come and get 'em!

Edit: Speaking of culinary genius, our event with Ree Drummond  (of Pioneer Woman fame) was a smashing success! Even after a signing line lasting nearly 3 hours, she was still awesome enough to sign quite a few of her cookbook Pioneer Woman Cooks: Food from My Frontier for our store. If you missed out on meeting Ms. Drummond, come on by for a signed copy before they're all gone!

Destination: Paradise

I recently received a gift in the mail, a slim volume about the size of an envelope, with a red cloth cover. In plain white letters across the top it read: The Portable Paradise, and, below the title, was a quote from E.M. Forester's A Room with a View" "'Tut, tut, Miss Lucy! I hope we shall soon emancipate you from Baedeker.'"

The author, Jonathan Keates, introduces himself in the beginning pages as a collector of old travel guidebooks. The guidebook, Keates claims, is as valid a genre of literature as Fiction, Poetry, or the Essay. Through an old Baedeker, one might read the world. In the anonymous voices of the guides, as they observe local customs, advise you where to stay, and even in their silence about particular topics, the contemporary reader is offered a vivid glimpse of the history, culture, literature, and mannerisms of the time period in which the guidebook was written.

Delighted as I was by this concept, I was even more thrilled to find, in a recent arrival to the shelves of Destination Literature, an even more comprehensive history of travel--or, if Keates' theory is right--a history of the world through travel.

In Peter Whitfield's Travel: A Literary History is one of the first full surveys of travel literature through history, roving from Marco Polo to Henry James. Beginning with the pre-history of the genre and moving through the Age of Discovery to the Grand Tours of the eighteenth century and the taming of America's wilds in the nineteenth century, Whitfield takes us all the way up to the boom of travel writing over the last century, comparing the works of Forester, Durrell, Waugh, Fermor, Bowles, and Lawrence.

The Baedeker guidebooks, both Keates and Whitfield could tell you, were some of the first replacements of the cicerone, or chaperone, of young people's travels to the continent in the eighteenth century. With a guidebook in your pack, you were free to travel the world on your own. Today we are guided not only by the descendants of the Baedeker, such as Lonely Planet and Rick Steve's, but also have access to innumerable literary guides, as outlined by Whitfield. Comb his survey for writers who have written on your favorite destinations, or simply browse our shelves.

I'm always surprised to find some of my favorite fiction writers not only traveled the world, but wrote about their travels. We have Goethe on Italy and Hemingway on Paris. We have Emerson's English Traits and James' English Hours. Even E.E. Cummings wrote a book on his travels to Soviet Russia. We have the travel writing of Lawrence Durrell, Robert Lewis Stevenson, and Somerset Maugham. Let's hope we are never emancipated from such Baedekers.

A Curated Selection for the Time-Traveller

Basically my job is to buy books from people when they come in to the shop to sell them. It is a fun job. Though my exciting job of mostly repetition (Steig Larsson, Jodi Picoult, Tracy Kidder, Steig Larsson, Jodi Picoult, lather, rinse, repeat) eventually yields delicious discovery! Like last Saturday, man-oh-man I'll tell you what. I've been at this job for a year now (where was my petting zoo and pizza party?!) and days like last Saturday are few and far between. Nearly everybody who came in had rad stuff, things we were looking for, things we can always use, things I've never seen before that are magical and strange. Basically, it was a good day for buyin'. But my favorite thing about days like that, as you may be able to tell from reading the blog, is finding neat patterns in the seemingly random collections people bring in.

Like this sequence of relics from the past, titles in present tense and speculative fiction of the future:

For just $5.50, you can own a piece of Massachusetts history. The North Shore of Massachusetts Bay: An Illustrated Guide and History comes with cool, out-of-date maps, awesome engravings, and is a complete reissue of an 1881 text, so even the typeface used is old-timey. Slip into this slim volume and be transported to a time when there was no CVS in downtown Salem and tooth extraction was a mere .25, add some ether or gas for $1.00!

But nowadays, you're pathologized for living in the past; nostalgia is a sickness, those times were no good, you gotta live in the NOW. Well, right NOW is all about poetry, cool illustrations and strange superheroes. Only because I love the title of this book and when co-bookseller Jamie saw it, she oohed and aahed over it, confessing it was a personal favorite. And really, good poetry is best read as a clean slate: completely in the present, without reference to past or concern for the future.

Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting to Cross by Mark Yakich is a confluence of many great things, to appreciate here and now. The jacket copy is a handy map to the contents, "If you like poems about the sea, turn to page 49," also, "And then, there's everyone's greatest joy and incense: 'Love Poems,' which you will find, like the French, everywhere and nowhere at once, but especially on p. 64 with 'A Little Morning After Poem.'"

But, if you're like me: certifiably ADD, a terminal daydreamer, and with all but a diagnosis in-hand for restless leg, mind and eye syndrome, perhaps travelling to the future might excite your emotions. And not just any future-story, but one in which a believable, empathetic underdog is the protagonist.


I submit to you, for $6.50, The Brave Little Toaster Goes to Mars. When we pack up our earthly possessions and head to Mars for some light terraforming and condo-building, this is the novel you will need in your space-rucksack, as it offers all kinds of helpful suggestions for peaceful coexistence with our appliance friends who will obviously already be living there after their uselessness on Earth compels them to found a new civilization on the Crimson Planet. Maybe they'll teach us how to grow Mars Bars. Mmmmm.

Until next time, friends! Unless I'm living on Mars! In which case: bring kittens!