It has been a while since I have written anything here from behind the counter, except for a little note earlier today about Andrea Modica’s As We Wait. I suppose that is how these things go. You begin with good intentions, imagine yourself faithfully writing every few days, and then life wanders off in another direction and takes you with it.
In my case, much of August has been spent trying to stay cool.
Florida in August has a way of making everything feel slightly more difficult than it ought to be. You step outside and immediately wonder why you did. The air is heavy, the sun seems unusually determined, and even the shortest trip to the mailbox begins to feel like poor planning.
Hughey, the shop dog, wants no part of it either.
He has developed a very sensible summer policy. Go outside only when absolutely necessary, conduct whatever business brought you there with reasonable speed, and return immediately to the nearest air-conditioning vent.
I can’t say I disagree with him.
There is something misleading about the word August. It sounds as though it ought to belong to autumn. August should have cool mornings, dry leaves breezing across sidewalks, light sweaters appearing from closets, and perhaps a pot of soup on the stove.
Instead, Florida gives us ninety-something degrees, thunderstorms that appear out of nowhere, mosquitoes large enough to have personal histories, and air so thick you could probably store it in jars.
So much for autumn.
While hiding from the heat, however, I have been doing a little work around the shop. Not the sort that involves moving heavy boxes of books, because that seemed unnecessarily ambitious.
I decided to redesign the website.
Over time websites have a way of collecting things. Boxes, columns, buttons, menus, banners, notices and all sorts of little busy pieces we once thought were necessary. Eventually you look at the page and realize the books are almost fighting their way through to be seen.
So I began taking things away.
The new Uncommon Bookshop is simpler.
That is really the entire idea.
Less decoration. Less wandering around. Less trying to make the website behave like something it isn’t.
Just the content.
Books that turn up in the shop. Odd pieces of paper. Old photographs. Forgotten magazines. Interesting bits of history. Things I find while digging through boxes. Stories connected to objects that have somehow survived longer than the people who first owned them.
And, when I manage to sit down and actually write one, another entry in this Shopkeeper’s Log.
I have always liked the idea that this little corner of the website should feel less like a business blog and more like a notebook left open on the counter. Some days there might be something worth telling. Other days perhaps nothing more interesting happened than Hughey sleeping through the afternoon while I sorted books.
But that is shop life too.
The trouble with a Shopkeeper’s Log, of course, is that the shopkeeper eventually has to remember to keep the log.
I will try to do better.
There are plenty of things around here worth writing about. Shelves full of books with histories of their own, boxes that have not been opened in years, strange titles, forgotten authors, pieces of old Florida, and the occasional object that makes me stop and wonder how in the world it ended up here.
So I am going to try to stay with this writing gig a little more faithfully and keep the shop site from drying up completely.
Although in this Florida humidity, I suppose drying up may be the one thing I do not actually have to worry about.
Thanks for stopping by.
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