Capitol Hill Books Has DC’s Most Curmudgeonly Store Owner
washingtonian.com
Capitol Hill Books Has DC’s Most Curmudgeonly Store Owner
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Re: Capitol Hill Books Has DC’s Most Curmudgeonly Store Owner
#2Curmudgeonly
Had to look that one up...
Re: Capitol Hill Books Has DC’s Most Curmudgeonly Store Owner
#3Hah, this is the perfect embodiment of why I rarely patronize local businesses. The kind of person who starts one of these establishments is no doubt quirky.
There is a coffee shop next door to my apartment. It has random rules posted on all surfaces to which signs can be affixed. Feel like I'm going to go to prison if I walk in there and do something wrong inadvertently, so I just go to Starbucks to avoid causing any problems. I like that these people are running a coffee shop, and I'd like to support them. But it's just too scary for me. Better to stick with something inviting, or at least known.
My favorite part of this article is how the owner doesn't say he runs the bookstore solely to overhear people's conversations, but it seems clear to me that that's his main reason. Rules about what you cannot say, "I don't like cell phones because you can only hear one side of the conversation", etc. I'll pass.
Maybe this is all an east coast thing, though. In Chicago I never noticed local businesses being quirky (and I'll go out of my way to get coffee at Intelligentsia). Same with Mountain View. But everyone in New York has quite the desire to become king or queen of their own empire, and are sure to let you know it.
Re: Capitol Hill Books Has DC’s Most Curmudgeonly Store Owner
#4It's sad that, the more I live off my Kindle, the less serendipity I let into my reading life. There's something about the experience of a bookstore -- thumbing through a commentary on Origen in the Strand's basement and feeling the subway rattle the walls, finding a classic dime-store noir novel at Kayo, happening upon a first edition of Nabakov at McMurtry's Booked Up -- that gives you the sense of finding something secret, knowledge hidden away in the mouse-eaten pages of a volume buried deep in the stacks; books too rare, too obscure to ever make it to the clean and spacious realm of digitization. Now I'm mostly likely to just check out the daily and monthly deals in the Kindle store and never set foot in an actual store. I think I'm the poorer for it.
Re: Capitol Hill Books Has DC’s Most Curmudgeonly Store Owner
#5It's sad that, the more I live off my Kindle, the less serendipity I let into my reading life. There's something about the experience of a bookstore -- thumbing through a commentary on Origen in the Strand's basement and feeling the subway rattle the walls, finding a classic dime-store noir novel at Kayo, happening upon a first edition of Nabakov at McMurtry's Booked Up -- that gives you the sense of finding somethin…
What's stopping you from ditching the kindle and finding a bookstore?
Re: Capitol Hill Books Has DC’s Most Curmudgeonly Store Owner
#6It's sad that, the more I live off my Kindle, the less serendipity I let into my reading life. There's something about the experience of a bookstore -- thumbing through a commentary on Origen in the Strand's basement and feeling the subway rattle the walls, finding a classic dime-store noir novel at Kayo, happening upon a first edition of Nabakov at McMurtry's Booked Up -- that gives you the sense of finding somethin…
One Story used to be good for discovering different authors. It's no where near what you're describing, but it's a start.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Story
I still buy a bunch of non-fiction by looking through charity shops (UK version of thrift stores, maybe).
Re: Capitol Hill Books Has DC’s Most Curmudgeonly Store Owner
#7Hah, this is the perfect embodiment of why I rarely patronize local businesses. The kind of person who starts one of these establishments is no doubt quirky. There is a coffee shop next door to my apartment. It has random rules posted on all surfaces to which signs can be affixed. Feel like I'm going to go to prison if I walk in there and do something wrong inadvertently, so I just go to Starbucks to avoid causing an…
> Maybe this is all an east coast thing, though.
There are some coffee shops in Oakland that have explicit no laptop policies. I used to live near a coffee in shop in Portland where the owner would randomly unplug the wifi if he didn't like the people sitting in his shop and working.
Re: Capitol Hill Books Has DC’s Most Curmudgeonly Store Owner
#8It's sad that, the more I live off my Kindle, the less serendipity I let into my reading life. There's something about the experience of a bookstore -- thumbing through a commentary on Origen in the Strand's basement and feeling the subway rattle the walls, finding a classic dime-store noir novel at Kayo, happening upon a first edition of Nabakov at McMurtry's Booked Up -- that gives you the sense of finding somethin…
What's stopping you from ditching the kindle and finding a bookstore?
Part of it is no longer having eighty linear feet of ten-foot high bookcases anymore, part of it is just that the Kindle is so damned convenient for most books, and Safari only slightly less so. (And it's not as if I don't visit bookstore at all -- I walked out of a used bookstore the other day with a monograph on NLP and a copy of The Grand Strategy of Phillip II, both of which were serendipitous finds.)
But there's definitely a crowding-out effect with e-books, or even Amazon's many books for a penny (plus S&H). With Amazon, I no longer have to search widely for a particular book or topic, but that also means I'm not going to randomly wander through other sections and suddenly discover buried gold. In a certain sense, I have more information about a narrow segment of the market -- the specific book I'm looking for -- but less information about the market in general.
Re: Capitol Hill Books Has DC’s Most Curmudgeonly Store Owner
#93rd pic down in the bottom left, you can see "Surely Your Joking Mr. Feynman". Seems this bookshop owner has some good taste in what he chooses to stock :)
Re: Capitol Hill Books Has DC’s Most Curmudgeonly Store Owner
#10Hah, this is the perfect embodiment of why I rarely patronize local businesses. The kind of person who starts one of these establishments is no doubt quirky. There is a coffee shop next door to my apartment. It has random rules posted on all surfaces to which signs can be affixed. Feel like I'm going to go to prison if I walk in there and do something wrong inadvertently, so I just go to Starbucks to avoid causing an…
> Maybe this is all an east coast thing, though. There are some coffee shops in Oakland that have explicit no laptop policies. I used to live near a coffee in shop in Portland where the owner would randomly unplug the wifi if he didn't like the people sitting in his shop and working.
I think that's a reasonable if somewhat misguided policy, I've worked in coffeeshops and I make sure I buy something every half hour or so (not good for the waistline) since I'm occupying space they are paying for.
I actually wish they'd work out what a fair market rate is for someone occupying that desk, throw in unlimited coffee and just charge me by the hour.
If it gets really busy I clear out since they can make more turning over tables than with me sat there, I've noticed by doing that and not pretending to own the table I'm sat at the coffee shop owners are friendlier.