Malibu morning picture of the day - Friday, September 19, 2014

Now thank we all our God,
for now it is a Friday...

That's a good liturgical way to say TGIF! It even scans to the Bach chorale tune.

Here's Friday's photo.

Yep, cloudy at the coast. Nice and cool too. Should get up to 75 here in the Bu. Here's the second view just to the right.










Earlier this week I was at a mall in Topanga area and I wandered into a store that had a familiar name: Crown Books, they even had the same logo.

You have to be a certain age to remember them. They went out of business way ahead of the mega-death of large bookstores. Borders did them in (and then Amazon in turn killed Borders). They always had bestsellers at loss-leader prices, but you had to walk to the back of the store to get them, so you always wound up getting a few more books on your way out. They weren't sexy with designer shelves and mood lighting, they didn't sell coffee, they didn't have authors come and speak, and you still had to get info out of books instead of for free on the Net. And they were all over the place.

I liked that they were honest about the bestsellers lists and so frequently the number one book for sale for a few bucks was always Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell.

There was one right near my house in Hollywood. Funny story I got from a salesperson there. When the Rodney King riots broke out and everybody started looting stores, the mobs cleaned out the inventory of the Circuit City (like a small-scale Best Buy) immediately next store.

The Crown Books staff came in after the cops finally decided to restore calm expecting the place to be trashed and empty. Not so. A window was broken because, they assumed, someone had ditched a TV into their premises probably to avoid being arrested or some bad-ass taking it from them. Otherwise, their store inventory was untouched. She said it was a case of reverse-looting.



The fascinating thing about this Crown Books in Topanga is that it is a USED book store. So I walk in to look around and it is EXACTLY the same inventory of 15-20 year-old published works, from bestsellers to history to self-help that were new in the old Crown Books. I felt like the protagonist in the old movie The Time Machine where he successively checks out his neighborhood as he works his way into the future several years at a time.Things are the same, but different.

I bought an armload of expensive quotation reference books for my current work at no more than $5 apiece. Crown Books once again managed to claim all of the walking-around cash in my pocket, but leaving me with smile as I exit with all the wisdom and prose I could carry.

Have a wonderful weekend.

Love,
Pops


PS Here's a tip if you buy a lot of used books. I've been told that bed bugs like to travel in them. (People read themselves to sleep--no surprise there.) So just stick your books in the freezer for a day before you read them.