ROSELEDGE BOOKS REGULARS

Nothing beats the fun of Roseledge Books Regulars returning after a couple of summers and choosing to buy the somewhat unusual — okay, strange — books I love and so have on the shelves.

For instance, Leanne Shapton’s Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry is an auction catalog of the belongings of imaginary people who come alive through a “reading” of pictures of their things. This is like “meeting” a person by looking at the things in his or her house, especially looking closely at the arranged titles in bookshelves, or, even better, on a beside table.  I liked the general idea of Ms. Shapton’s book, but the browser-in-question may have been more taken with some of the items.  Her book reminded me of Stanislaw Lem’s A Perfect Vacuum, a book of book reviews of books that weren’t. And I loved Leanne Shapton’s earlier Native Trees of Canada, an exquisite book of stunning watercolors of leaves, one leaf/page.  She allows spaces for our imagination to fill in.   What fun all of this was.

The sun sets, the boat's duties done; the book finds its way to the reader.

Then, I may have talked this interesting RB bookie into Maira Kalman’s Principles of Uncertainty, but it wasn’t a hard sell. Her combination of pictures and comments makes me want to travel with her and hope that she talks about what she sees as she looks at it. Her blog in the NYT, And the Pursuit of Happiness, will be issued in paperback this October and RB will have it next summer. I love her worldview. Wise, good-natured, knowing.

Then as RB Regulars who sail sometimes do, these two who, with their RB T-shirts are now both RB Regulars, checked out whatever I had on voyages, in this case round-the world voyages, and found to their liking Lawrence Bergreen’s Over the Edge of the World (Magellan) and Geoffrey Wolff’s Hard Way Around (Joshua Slocum), and, after a quick check of the North Atlantic table, Arnauldur Indridason’s Operation Napoleon, an Icelandic thriller with roots in a WWII plane crash. Surely it can’t be any more noir than his Erlander novels, but I haven’t read my copy yet.

I love being bookseller to the picky. Roseledge Books Regulars are the best.

Big time thunderstorm at the moment. Mugginess is to be gone tomorrow. Luckily I don’t have to be outdoors today, but for boaters caught walking down Sea Street, Roseledge Books is open and the cottage innards are drip dry.