Read All About It!

Along with all of the building construction, design, demolition and planning, we’ve also started discussing how we want Open Books to feel. How it should look and even smell are topics of lengthy conversation. We’re starting to get a handle on it and Stacy came up with a very clever way to describe part of our “look”, Antique Chic!

We want to find fun, unique and quirky pieces of furniture especially to put in the store. So I am proud to say that I was lucky enough to score our first treasure! This AMAZING table!

Thanks to Craigslist we got this gem for a song and the money is going to help a lovely couple who is raising funds to adopt a child! Now how cool is that?

I love this table! For obvious reasons….it looks like a gigantic stack of books. It also flips open so you can store things inside, just all around VERY cool. So stay tuned for more exciting eccentricities!

One of the joys in any new business is its specific vocabulary. A few years ago, deep in the heart of the car business, I eventually learned what amounted to a new language, and I still use some of those terms occasionally. ($100, for instance, is a buck, and a dealership is a store.) With Open Books we are starting to learn the lingo of the book and construction trades, and we can now talk about modified draw (a way of financing), double-rub (indicator of fabric strength), hurts (books in bad shape that get returned to the publisher), universal design (the idea that a building should be equally usable by all people) and self-certification (process of an architect determining whether proposed buildings are in compliance with applicable regulations.) Good stuff, all of it. Perhaps we will write a dictionary someday, though the audience who would appreciate it is probably limited to the posters on this blog.

So I ordered take-out Chinese for lunch the other day, and do you know what my fortune in my fortune cookie read?

“YOU ARE CAPABLE OF BUILDING A THRIVING BUSINESS VENTURE”

Well good, excellent and self-assuring, because I am really committed to this project, and feel very very fortunate to be a part of it! So readers, if you’ve ever been inspired by a cookie fortune, let me have em’ or better yet, if you have a cookie fortune that came true, I want to know! Because this fortune is one I certainly hope becomes a reality.

Due to a series of coincidences and failure of plans, I will be driving to New England next week and back again six days later instead of flying both ways. Although we will go as fast as is safely possible, it will still be 30 or more hours in a car, cruising the long lonely unloved stretches of Ohio and Pennsylvania and watching the road spin by. 30 hours is really quite a lot of time. For most people, it is almost an entire work week. So: what can I and the car’s CD player do to keep my mind functioning for all that time?

Listen to fiction?

Listen to nonfiction?

Learn a foreign language?

Kind readers, have you any specific suggestions?

Note: in addition to this road trip, there will be another one in January to pick up a truckful of books from an extraordinarily generous individual in Minnesota. That one, unfortunately, will be conducted in a U-Haul truck without amenities like CD players (or, for that matter, heat). Ah well.

So it is “Elsewhere Wednesday” and I feel that my mind has been also. Have you ever lost your keys? You know that all important item that allows you “in” places? My ring has keys to my home, keys to other people’s homes, a key to my mailbox, instrument locker, and the all important Dominick’s Super Savings key card. I have a small history of losing my keys. Once, in a sly and clever attempt to outwit a burglar, I went out for a run and slid my keys that I didn’t need under a door mat. A burglar would NEVER check there! And forgot about them. 5-6 months later someone jostled the door mat and EUREKA, there they were! Stacy dropped her keys in the sewer once. It really happens to everyone. But the happy part of this blog is that my keys were found. They are on their way back to me in the mail. The good news to YOU, fond readers of this blog, is that I can focus my mind now not on my lost keys, but on the blog posting schedule which I agreed to follow and have been neglecting shamelessly.