Trivial Pursuit

I'm a little strapped for time today so a quick spritz of bibliophile trivia is all I've got for you then and I'm off to do some other bookstore stuff. Did you know that Frank Miller designed this edition of Gravity's Rainbow? I didn't, but a friend of mine recently pointed out that there's a little 'FM' in the bottom right corner there. Kinda' neat. Anyway, I'd better get going. Later, dawgz.

Too Damn Many Books!

Sometimes we just get so many books in our warehouse that we have to clear some of them out. Here's the Yelp review of the clearance store we had up the street a few years ago. That surplus was due mostly to shutting down our internet warehouse and suddenly finding ourselves with thousands of more books than we knew what to do with. Not quite the case this time, but we do have some excellent remainders that our buyers just guessed wrong on. We thought they would sell in droves, and some of them did, just not droves enough. These are quality books like Pen/Faulkner winner Netherland in hardback for a mere $2.99,`Eric Schlosser's young adult edition of Fast Food Nation called Chew on This for a mere $1.99, and maybe the best buy of all, The Ultimate David Sedaris audio collection on CD, which retailed for almost $100 when it was new, now it is only $24.98. Supplies are limited, get 'em while they're hot.

Check out these other highlights from the clearance table:

Roast Chicken and Other Stories: Originally $24.95 then $7.98 Now $3.99

McSweeney's 24 Originally $24.00 Then $9.98 Now $4.99

Chris Ware: Originally $22.50 Then $9.98 Now $4.99

September Author Events au go-go

For whatever reason, over the last year, more and more publishers and authors have offered to have (FREE!) events at Green Apple. That bounty has hit some sort of critical mass this month: we're hosting NINE events in September.

Last night was a look at SF history through photographs with Rebecca Schall. Tonight is Joseph Mattson, author of Empty the Sun. How can you go wrong with a pre-apocalyptic cross-country race to bury the murdered past, culminating in a gunfight with God? To top it off, the book comes with a CD that sets this beautifully reckless novel of transgressive loss to an open-road, open-whiskey soundtrack composed by Drag City recording artist Six Organs of Admittance.

Nick Zinner (of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs); Rick Bass (fiction); Dave Eggers (fiction); Saul Austerlitz (on American film comedy); Fred Lyon (on SF history in photographs) and John Casti (on why mood matters).

And next month brings Litquake and another bounty of fantastic authors.

So if you're not already on our email list, sign up here. Or bookmark our events page so that when you're itching to go out, you can include literature and your friends at Green Apple in your plans. There's a seat waiting for you. . .

(photo by Robin Allen; thanks, Robin!)

In Praise of Old Books

Despite the fact that used books occupy 2/3 of the space in our store - and that used book sales support our smaller stock of new books - there's a tendency for us to blog almost exclusively about new (in both senses: new as in unused and new as in recently released) books. There are reasons for this: mostly due to our, well, quaint point of sales system and the sheer volume of secondhand books that come across the buy counter in a single day, it would be almost impossible for us to catalog every used book.*

Then, of course, there's the tendency to tout the new, the in-the-news, and ultimately for our purposes here, those books we can link to.

But, sadly (or fortunately, for those who prefer to retain some distinction between the virtual and real worlds), there are thousands of books that fall into none of those categories, most broadly those books we don't stock new for whatever reason (space is usually a determining factor), out-of-print books, remainders, etc. Thousands of these kinds of books will never make it onto our blog, even if they're in our hearts. They'll sit on our shelves, unlit by the glare of the computer screen, waiting for the winds of fate to blow someone toward them; some sooner, others later; some by chance, others by necessity.

So while we continue to sing the praises of our monthly picks, the latest work by one of our favorite authors, or the book gracing the front page of the New York Times Book Review, remember that the serendipitous charm of a used bookstore - and for the browser, the curious, the hopeful-for-happy-accidents, the reason to get off the internet and stand in a physical space overburdened with possibility in the form of books - is that you just might find something unexpected. Or something you've been searching a lifetime for.





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* Changes, I'm told, are imminent; which means that soon this post will be as antiquated as our MS-DOS based inventory program.