More book shopping, more cats
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| Basketball players and midgets can take their custom elsewhere. (Photos by Peter Rozovsky, your humble blog keeper) |
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| 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.
Labels: Adams Avenue Books, Balboa Park, bookstores, California, Coutnerpoint Records & Books, independent bookstores, Los Angeles, Marston House Museums and Gardens, San Diego, what I did on my vacation
posted by Peter Rozovsky at 5:16 PM
6 Comments:
My dad was a big fan of that Jane Jacobs book, which I may have mentioned here before.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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