Creation Story

Customers often ask where the name of the store came from. In answer to this question, we go back to the archives, to an introduction that the founder of the store, Richard Savoy, wrote for our first print newsletter back in 1989. Here it is reprinted in its entirety:

And now a cautionary and somewhat naive (I was very young then) tale of the "meaning" of the store name and why I sell books. It is intended as a reference to that infamous apple in Genesis. It just struck me that the apple eating incident and subsequent fall from grace and being asked to leave the Garden of Eden wasn't such a bad thing. With this came knowledge- a process, not an absolute. Hence the cult of the expert: orthodoxy in science, intolerance in religion, rigidity in government. Books offer the largest, most varied, and easily obtained body of knowledge. We try to keep in mind that the act of printing a word doesn't make it true. To finish, John Ciardi's warning about the expert, be it in science, religion, or government (anyone's):

Who could believe an ant
in theory?
A giraffe in blue print?
Ten Thousand doctors of what's
possible could reason
the jungle out of being.

I know, I know, it doesn't tell us why it's called The Green Apple, but it's good to maintain a little mystery.