cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Lindsay is so good. It is literally like living in a TV show. Again, but this time it isn't an HBO drama about the lead-up to and fallout from a neo-nazi riot. A little over a week ago I bought a really well-known collection of books. The "P1nk Warehouse" books. About 50 years ago, a couple moved from New Orleans to Charlottesville. The husband and wife were both from old NO families. He had run for senate and governor in Louisiana and bought five different copies of many of the books that he loved. The husband left and went back South. The wife and their children stayed. The P1nk Warehouse became a bohemian community over the ensuing decades. The D@ve Mathews Band played their first concert there, and named a song after the place. The 6,000 square feet of the top floor had been the family home for a few years but all of it, including the library, was turned into apartments by the mid-nineties. I bought all of the books in the Library. For $400. But I had to have everything out by Monday morning of this week. It was a massive task. The first day, last Tuesday, I brought in Anthony, who has worked at the bookstore for ten years and is an English major and knows how to spot shit. For two hours we called out to each other. "Holy fuck, signed first edition Tom Wolfe!" "Oh fucking shit, this is a first edition Finnegans Wake!" Now I am finding that most of this shit was beyond Anthony's literary and historical experience, and beyond my own. As I go through third and fourth passes, doing real research, I'm seeing valuable shit that went over both of our heads. Books in the $50 to $200 range. This was six days of work packing around 120 boxes and carrying them down two flights of stairs. Checking and rechecking them. I was trying to get rid of all but around 20 of them, but by the end I had to get a fucking storage unit to stash the last 40 odd boxes. $150 a month, indefinitely, until I find a home for this shit. Then when I showed up for work today all I wanted as a chill day at the desk .And as I walked in, Katie was accepting six fucking boxes of books. No. But wait. They were all obviously pre-1900. Of course I want that shit. Medical texts from the 1880's. Law books from the 1890's, less so, but all sorts of assholes want leather-bound legal books behind their desks to look well-read so I guess I can sell that shit soon enough. Tomorrow I start work on building the new work counter behind the desk. This is to accommodate the work flow around selling books online. We have thousands and thousands of dollars worth of rare books that we are unlikely to sell in the store. June pretty much demanded, as the P1nk Warehouse was wrapping up, that I build this thing that we need to make online sales happen. June is trans and 24 years old. She reminds me a lot of my daughter. June has become my right-hand person in all things about running D@edalus Books. She is about 5'2" tall, looks very feminine, with a cleft chin, a slight figure, and hair that ranges from green to black. I run every idea by every volunteer and employee of the bookstore, but she is the one most likely to talk me out of something. June is usually right. I gave her a raise as soon as I bought the bookstore. Because she works harder than anyone else and throws herself into the same kind of seemingly intractable projects that I did. I had the idea of having a sale, promoted on our Instagram, where anyone can get 20% off if they do "I'm a Little Teapot," complete with the dance and the lyrics. June said no, and she was right. We have ideas quickly sometimes. After promising on Instagram to eliminate our football section if nobody bought a single book from it by the end of the superbowl, I proposed that we replace the football section with a display of our books on lingerie and women's shoes. June agreed that this is fucking hilarious, and we made it so within minutes. June asks to come fishing with me when the weather gets good again. I will take her. She is a wonderful person. I bring music in thinking about what June might like. So far, she really likes Bat For Lashes and Mazzy Star. I ordered some John Cale CDs and I hope that she will like them. I have a wonderful group of people who work for me. I really like all of them. It seems like all of them like the massive amount of work that I am putting into this bookstore and the new way of doing things that I have introduced. And there is Lindsay. She helped a lot with the P1nk Warehouse project during the first few days. She is so very, very good. I want to be attracted to her. The hair loss is not her fault. Not putting any effort into her appearance arguably is. She seems to be barely eating, as if her weight was an issue, which it is not, except that maybe/definitely she is getting kinda too thin. Lindsay is so good. She is so sweet and willing to work so hard at anything that I begin. 2:54 a.m. - 2024-02-13 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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