Sunday, November 23, 2014

More book shopping, more cats

Basketball players and midgets can take their custom elsewhere. (Photos by Peter Rozovsky, your humble blog keeper)
First, San Diego's Balboa Park is now one of my favorite places in the world. What more could one ask than botanical wonders, lush grass, a good restaurant or two, and more museums than you could shake a palm frond at?

Iconic!


Saturday's book shopping at the Adams Avenue Book Store and Marston House in San Diego and Counterpoint Records & Books in Los Angeles yielded Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities; two by P.G. Wodehouse, including a collection of his one-liners; thoughts on evolution from E.O. Wilson; Mischief, by Bouchercon discovery Charlotte Armstrong; and a good photo of one of the Adams Avenue shop's two cats.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

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6 Comments:

Blogger seana graham said...

My dad was a big fan of that Jane Jacobs book, which I may have mentioned here before.

November 23, 2014  
Blogger Unknown said...

What is it with bookstores and cats? Of course, as soon as I ask that, I remember a local bookstore where she woman kept a parrot. At another bookstore the owner kept a monkey. I guess there is something about bookstores and animals, but I've never seen a dog in a bookstore. Dog ears but no dogs.

November 23, 2014  
Blogger Peter Rozovsky said...

Seana, there is no such thing as a must-read book, and there never will be, but the Jacobs probably comes as close as any. The book appeared in, I think, 1058, and many commonplaces of discussion about cities seem to have originated with her, or at least to have entered current thinking because of her book.

November 24, 2014  
Blogger Peter Rozovsky said...

R.T.: Because the sleeping and the styling and profiling that constitute so much of a cat's daily routine do not imperil books the way an active dog might.

November 24, 2014  
Blogger seana graham said...

After a couple of decades of being a no dogs downtown kind of city, Santa Cruz reversed itself and became a bring your dogs downtown kind of city, which meant that many businesses, including the bookstore I then worked in became a bring your dogs inside kind of business and I believe that after I left they even adopted a rescue dog. I like dogs, but I am not sure that dogs in shops is a great idea. When I first started working at the store there was a store cat named Walt who was pretty much a town icon.

My dad liked to talk about the books that intrigued him, so I absorbed a fair amount by osmosis. It looks like it was published in 1961, but maybe it came into vogue a bit later than that, as I would have been too young to have been listening to ideas on urban planning at that point.

November 24, 2014  
Blogger Peter Rozovsky said...

My local cafe in Philadelphia is a gathering place for people with dogs. I have met four greyhounds there, and I have enjoyed their presence. (That presence does not violate local health ordinances because no food is cooked at the cafe.)

I also think dogs may not be a good idea in shops because until old age, they might be too active to be comfortable confined indoors all day, unlike those languid, fat cats.

November 24, 2014  

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