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Downtown Books & News

Last Updated: 11/18/2009

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Gender: Female
Status: In a Relationship
Age: 20
Sign: Cancer

City: ASHEVILLE
State: North Carolina
Country: US
Signup Date: 4/12/2007

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Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Turkey Word

And a hearty howdy to you!

Tomorrow is the holiest of national holidays, Thanksgiving (well, batter up to 4th of July I suppose). I hope the festicals are really firm and fun for y'all. We here at Downtown Books & News will be open, but only from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Ms Ingrid has agreed to take one for the team and work the holiday. You should, if the lord's willing and the creeks don't rise, pay her a visit. Ingrid is about 8 and a half fathoms of lovely and we all really appreciate her coming in so the rest of us can sit on our bones all day.

If I'm lucky I'll nod off around five p.m. with a spoon clenched between my teeth, kinda drooling down the side of the mouth. ((That drool trail will burst up into pimples by Friday morning; gonna be awesome))

My five year old son will see me sitting there like a meat sack and be filled with non-defined shame and disgust and probably result in him suffering from a rather non-masculine eating disorder when he's a teenager. My wife will take on a young lover from Italy, but I don't care because I know cranberries still love me. Yes you do. Yes you do. yes you do... Dam, I love Thanksgiving!

Anyhow, last weekend we had the first Juniper Bends reading here
and it was really pretty great. Mind numbing turn out. A good 40
people were here. And that's super. Super for the store, but maybe
more important it's super for the creative folks who read. Thanks
everyone. The next Juniper Bends event won't take place until January.
The readers will include Chall Gray, Ingrid Carson (see above), Jaye Bartell and, Lord help us, me.

On December 4th will be our next event. Jack Herranen will be
here reviewing his documentary Affirming Our Wisdoms.
Jack has lived for the last 8 years in a Quechua community in Bolivia. The film
will be 20 minutes long and then there will be a discussion period
and some a short acoustic set. Starts at 7 p.m. and is a free event.

Wonder what she is thankful for?

I don't think I quite understand why you haven't been by for this yet.

You know Found? Great publication.
We should be seeing this here new volume sometime in the next week.

Goatman.

Goatman?

We here hope you all have a great holiday with lovely fixins.

thanks for reading

Julian @ DBN

7:03 PM

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Friday, November 20, 2009

What's your flavor?

10:35 PM

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Saturday, November 14, 2009

Word on the Street - November right now

Hark!

This'll be my 50th blog post. Isn't that fancy?
I like writing these and I guess as long as people keep reading it
then there is a point. So thanks for reading the blog about
Downtown Books & News.

On November 20th, we will beginning our hosting of the Juniper Bends Reading
Series. It is expected to be a monthly event, though due to holidays we will
won't having another until early 2010. Scheduled to come read here will be
UNCA Professor Lori Horvitz, Antonio Del Toro, Shad Marsh, M. Owens, Mesha Maren
and Tamiko Ambrose Murray. Please come and support your local creative folks
at your local used bookstore. Starts at seven p.m. and is a free event.

We've had some excellent books come in as of late (no surprise there... not for me
anyways). Our mysterious friend from Tennessee sold to us some excellent
Chaos Magick type books.
For example --

Other authors he brought to us include Draja Mickaharic, Aleister Crowley, Kenneth Feder,
David Rankine, Sorita d'Este, Sylvie Steinbach and one author who just goes by Lupa.
So if you are interested in getting your devil-may-care-thing going, you know where to come.
Here.

Trying to generate a list of all the books that come in here would be incredibly labor intensive, and me I'm just kinda lazy.
But if you like any of the following, maybe pay us a visit soon
- pottery, metal smithing, young adult books involving fantastic creatures,
fly fishing, Cirque du Soleil, sex, gardening, water gardening, smut, pagan idolatry, baking, flemish painters, Renaissance painters, surrealist painters, painting painters. We got us some Confederacy of Dunces, some For Whom the Bell Tolls, some Jodi Piccoult, C.S. Lewis, and a smattering of Ursula LeGuin, even have a couple Cormac McCarthys hanging around right now (ohh they go so quick). Mushrooms. Did you hear me? (see me actually) We have books on mushrooms. Boletti. I dunno, we got lots
of stuff. I ain't lying. Come prove me wrong.

I think I'm coming down with something. I got like a mussel living on the back of my throat.

I've been working that angle for years.

Dam fine cover art on this one. Published by McSweeney's. having not read it, I can't speak to how good of a book it is, but it was blurbed by the author of Geek Love, Katherine Dunn so that says something. Unless of course you did not read Geek Love.
Then it says nothing. You should read Geek Love. It will make you all warm and fuzzy
inside.
Favorite magazine right now -

Dude, the element, like from the periodic table? Bizmuth?
Bizmuth is totally tripped out

Hate books? Magazines send you into a bloodthirsty frenzy?
Think newspapers are dumb?
We can still hook you up.
Listen here, our DVD selection which admittedly had been looking pretty flimsy, in the last two days has become morbidly obese with variety. So bring your grumpy non-book reading self down here and hook up a dvd and a chocolate bar.
Chocolate loves you. Yes it does.

Here is the Goatman. If you see him, run.

thanks for reading our 50th blog.
Have a week of sweetness.

Julian @ DBN

4:06 PM

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Sunday, November 01, 2009

Word On The Street - November First

Hi Everyone,

I hope you all had a spooky-ass Halloween.
I went to the Montford Haunted Gymnasium, the bloody
public bathrooms were particularly claustraphobic and freaky.
Cheers to them on a job well done.

Here is something scarey for you.

The only thing you can find on Youtube on us is our bathroom.
I'm not sure how I feel about that. Oh but hey, if you happen to know
the fundamentalist Christian who drops off the Jack Chick pamphlets
on the free table tell him to bring us some more. Or if you have any,
swing them on by. If I can get enough I may want to paper a wall
in the bathroom with them. But I need about 200 more I'm guessing.

Along similar lines, I pulled this out of a 90 year old bible.

My guess is it's tongue-n-cheek. But no less sinister.

We did have a great weekend of bookbuying.
Every weekend of bookbuying is a good one really,
every weekend we get in books that I have never seen before.
And that says something too. I've worked here for years, I have
also worked at Malaprop's and when I lived in NYC I ran a
little bookstore that specialized in Lacanian Psychoanalysis (Other Books).
So I think I have some street cred in the I've-handled-some-odd
-books world. Or not. Your welcome to argument me down and
humble me with shame and your own inflated sense of grandeur.
Then maybe once I'm a soiled bit of ash, you can point out all my
spelling and grammatical errors in my blog. Jerk. Whatever makes
you feel good about yourself I guess.
Hello...father? What now?
So we had a good weekend buying books, as I was saying and here
are some cover scans.

Really lovely 112 year old book. Excellent shape and none
too expensive neither.

Maoist folktales (from China ).
Translated to English.

Nice person brought in a handful of M.L. Von Franz
books in.

I'm sure this is a great work on the metaphysical uses of rocks, but
the title makes me laugh like a seventeen year old.

One of my favorite books of all time.

This is a really cool book. It is literally the
translated fragments of Sappho's
works. Haunting and strange like dream flashes.

Hey if anyone knows who the clown is that keeps leaving partially chewed
toothpicks around the store, tell him (or her, but probably him)
that I am on to him.

That's all for now. It's Sunday and gloomy so you should come
on by and make time with us and spend your hard earned money here. And if not I still give you permission and hope you have a lovely week.

julian @ DBN

2:20 PM

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Friday, October 23, 2009

Word on The Street 10/23/09

Hello howdy-

First and most important, very hearty congrats to Julie (our Drink, Smoke, Read model) her baby Vivian, was born healthy and happy.

Yet another body to flesh out the ranks of Renaissance Bookfarm.

Thank you all for votin' us (and Malaprop's) up in Mountain Xpress' Best of Best Bookstores.

http://www.mountainx.com/bestof/2009/2009hunting_and_gathering

That's genuinely flattering. However, how we got beat out by Barne's and Nobles is pretty

crazy to me. I hate to be knee-jerk anti-corporate but there are really superb downtown bookstores besides us and Malaprop's, who can seriously read circles around B&N. Nuff said.

Here is an article about us and zines.

http://www.boldlife.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A5077

We love zines. They are organic, extremely varied in content, and

quite often dam near brilliant.

The link above is decent enough article (save the silly-ass photo of me)

about zines and us so I won't go on and on.

But here are cover scans of some great zines we have in stock right now.

brilliant!

lovely and heartfelt

local zine with emphasis on quality-artistic production value

as well as great writing inside.

One of the many great zines we order in through Microcosm. This one

is particularly good example of the grey area between zine and a proper book.

Cindy Crabb's Doris are definitely worth a peruse.

Excellent writing. They sell like hotcakes.

Hell yeah, punk rock zombie zine.

And that's just a meager smattering.

So the point is, if you have a little self-published staple

bound thing you've put together please bring them to us.

And the thing of it is, they do sell. Folks buy 'em.

So you should come check out all are zines and check out the books

and check us out cuz we look fine.

have a great week

julian @ DBN

5:19 PM

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Thursday, October 15, 2009

Word on the Street 10/15/2009

So I posted this and then the computer didn't like me and I didn't save it and it went away off into the computer ether and so then I had to rewrite. Which is frustrating.. Clearly this can only mean one thing, that God is punishing Downtown Books & News again.

But lets ignore the omnipotent adversary and just try to get on with blog-like gettin' ons.

Potential new advertising campaign, whaddayathink?

I took the picture below a while ago but keep forgetting to post it.

If you don't know who Popcorn Sutton is, where have you been?

Someplace a bit too repretable I'd imagine.

Go off and edumacate yerself. Go on! Git!

Southern Appalachia's most beloved moonshiner past on to great jug in the sky,

and we here in Asheville, have honored him in the best way we know how -

graffiti stencil!

We've had some pretty sweet items come in here's a quick sampler -

Here and I was thinking those dumb monkeys couldn't even tie their shoes.

love me some pink-n-purple books

another one of those great Dover books

Oh and all the images I use here are of the actual pictures. I do this because

I care. I may not acknowledge myself as being wholly alive anymore; my heart may be cold as granite, I lack all empathy for humanity, my soul may be being used as a winesack in hell, but I care about the books enough to scan the covers into Myspace. That's the sort of commitment to excellence you can expect here at DBN. Generally. Unless I hate.

And more. You all know us we got lots of good stuff in.

Probably weird book(s) of the week award goes to this three volume collection.

The prior owner who refers to himself as "Helcrypt", had the books bound

in red leather (lovely job to that).

What they are is the course materials for a cryptography class taught

by J. M. Wolfe (at the time a significant cypher) at the Brooklyn College.

This course was taught during the early 1940s and thus during the Second World War;

a time when code breaking could not be more crucial.

This material is rare and bound in this lovely of a manner they are unique.

Serious sweetness, check 'em out.

Okay that's all for now.

You all have nice days with this nice dreary weather we are having.

If you have any DVDs that you don't like, we may want to buy them.

Give us a chance. We're running low and it looks lame to have a section

with limited selection.

As it where.

okay goodbye.

and thanks for reading the blog for my favorite place, Downtown Books & News

-Julian@DBN

8:08 AM

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Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Word on the Street 9/29/09

You still owe me five dollars.

....

... ... ...

. . . . . . .

nawh you don't owe me jack.

You can keep your five dollars, seriously.

Check this book out

Yes, a stripper flip book. The book is intact and in good condition, but certainly has been

flipped more than a couple times.

What if that was your mom? Or what if that was you and your kids find out.

I guess you could give them the those were crazy days, things were different then - speech.

Life was one hedonistic escape tunnel after another. And the crack cocaine market had

really spiked and well, a girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do....

I will have to give a similar speech when my son at age 15 realizes... well never mind about that.

Hey come support travelling cartoonists and DBN and check this action out

This is going to be really cool.

We will be doing projections of their work up on a screen.

And it's free!

And to really keep the live action frothy and flowing, on October 6th we will be hosting a zine reading. Morgan Inez will be reading here from her zine We'll Never Have Paris. Morgan is great, and this should a swell-ass time (versus an ass-swell time).

And it's free!!

Here she is in myspace world.

http://www.myspace.com/hattieinez

Here's a smattering of product procured.

With all the Dover books we picked up a few weeks back, we also got a good number of

books on Ireland and Spain. One of the Irish ones that caught my fancy is

A Taste of Ireland by Theodora Fitzgibbon. Hardcover cook book, with lots of cool old

photographs. Dust jacket is in good/very good condition, with the interior being in

very good condition.

The Coming of Age by Simone de Beauvoir. A great work of nonfiction on aging by one of Dianne's favorite authors. Hardcover. Dust jacket is very good condition with a few stains on the spine. Dust jacket has been sleeved in mylar. Binding is tight, pages bright probably never read.

A Dictionary of Cantonese Slang. The Language of Hong Kong Movies, Street Gangs and City

Life. By Christopher Hutton and Kingsley Bolton. Trade paperback in fine condition.

Jeffrey Eugenides great fiction work, Middlesex. Trade paperback in very good/near fine condition.

Short Cuts by Raymond Carver. Modern classic of short story telling. Trade paperback. Our copy has seen better days, I'll admit it. Has some light pen markings in the interior, a bit of water damage and the binding is a bit suspect. Priced accordingly for being in good minus condition.

Last is a book of tripped new agey science fictionalistic art work. The New Visionaries from Mt Shastas (with Love) includes paintings by Charyl Yambrach Rose, Leonardo Rene, Rodney Birkett as well as paintings by the alien transplants of Andraleria, Ixthara and Aeoliah. Buy this book, surf the universe. Large format trade paperback in good - very good condition.

Okay, I need to move piles of books around the store. In that dark mindless way that I do every

Tuesday morning.

I'm watching you.

Know I'm not. I can't even see you...

if only those dam kids would quit playing that Throbbing Gristle

all night....

You just make sure you have a super saucey one.

julian @ DBN

12:21 PM

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Sunday, September 20, 2009

I know you want me to tell you what's cool.

So okay, here is what is cool.

It's my favorite thing right now.

Little handmade comic books.

We have them up at the front counter.

They cost a dollar.

Curious, no?

Julian @ DBN

6:27 PM

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Thursday, September 17, 2009

Word on the Street 9/17/09

Hello,

What are you doing on September 30th at 5:30 p.m.? You may want to consider makin'

a visit to 67 North Lexington Avenue and check us out. We are hosting three touring

cartoonists; Liz Baillie, Ken Dahl and MK Reed. Going to do projected presentation of their

work. Free event. See you then.

We have had an excellent couple of weeks of book buying. Very busy. Right now on our "book

fountain" I've put up some of the many many Dover edition books we've got in. I like Dover books

as they have an immense and varied catalog of subjects. Most Dovers I have ever handled have

been trade paperbacks. I particularly like how their large format paperback (coffee table-ish sized

books I'm thinking here) are made in a sturdy fashion, which many other publishers often fail

to do when they issue big paperbacks. Dover books, all have a similar look to them which I would

generally describe as classic, efficient and a bit understated, though never unattractive. What

Dover is also very much also known (and appreciated) for is their very low prices. Even new, no

other publisher is in the ball park price-wise. I went on a book buying expedition a couple of weeks

back and now we have dozens of Dovers.

Here we go --

Here are some other pretty cool titles we've picked up recently.

What the Bones Tell Us; An Anthropologist Examines the Evidence in an Attempt to Unravel Ancient Mysteries & Modern Crimes. by Jeffrey H Schwartz. 1998. Pretty self-explanatory title there. Trade paperback good/very good condition.

Extra Nutty! Even More Letters From a Nut by Ted Nancy. 2000. A collection of straight-faced, corporate responses to the author's profoundly silly and often just plain dumb inquiries and suggestions. Trade paperback good/very good condition.

Representing Woman: Sande Masquerades of the Mende of Sierra Leone by Ruth B. Phillips. 1995. Analysis of one African culture's uses of masks and other ritualistic clothing. Large format

trade paperback. Near fine condition.

Aramaic Light on the Gospel of John/Aramaic Light on the Gospels of Mark & Luke by Rocco Errico and George Lamas. 2001. Erudite reviews of New Testament Gospels by way of retranslations back

through the language they were originally written in; Aramaic. Both books are trade paperbacks in very good/near fine condition.

Siren's Dance: My Marriage to a Borderline by Anthony Walker. 2003. Memoir/case study of one man's turbulent and compassionate relationship with his ill wife. Hardcover. Very good condition, but with a mild bit of water damage on the spine of the dust jacket.

Here's a DBN tip. Want something to read and only have pocket change. We can hook you up. All of our mass markets (with a couple exceptions) are half the cover price. New, a mass market (and when I say mass market I am referring to the smallest paperback books, like you might see at a grocery store check-out line) runs around eight dollars, and thus we sell them for $4. But a mass market from say the 1950s sold new for maybe like eighty cents, and you will be charged half of that here at Downtown Books & News. I have on occasion wrung up books for twelve cents. Seriously, if that's not a nominal cost, I don't know what is. Normally there is only a few dozen books that cheap scattered around the store. But in the past week we have been releasing into our inventory hundreds of these. Now, they are primarily mystery-detective books, but if you gander around in fiction, science fiction and the other mass market sections you'll find some there too. To be clear though half the cover price only

applies to mass markets, not the hardcovers or the larger format trade paperbacks.

Okay, Dianne's here. I'm going to play mind games with her

Thanks for reading the blog for Downtown Books & News

- Julian @ DBN

12:26 PM

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