Dr Ray Stantz: “Symmetrical book stacking. Just like the Philadelphia mass turbulence of 1947.”
Dr. Peter Venkman: “You’re right, no human being would stack books like this.”
–Ghostbusters, 1984
Last Saturday Heather and I went to Excelsior Springs to kick around some antique shops and flea markets. We have found in our travels that you can categorize these shops in one of the following:
- Antique Shops–they have antiques, and sometimes other random things.
- The Savoy–they have antiques, and usually have names that are prefixed with ‘The’–The Blackthorn, The Pristine. These places are very expensive.
- Flea Markets–a little bit of everything, priced anywhere from bargains to way too much
- Junk shops–the prices don’t even matter, the place is full of junk
One of the places we went to was large and full of stuff, but another shopkeeper had given us the heads up that we should expect some “hoarder tendencies.” Turns out he was right–it was a junk shop extraordinaire. There were several rooms entirely sorted by color and material: teacup room, blue glass room, red glass room, white glass room, wood and brass room.
As we neared the end of our tour of this shop, I was, naturally, drawn to the books. At first. Then I decided I didn’t really want to sort through them. Now, there are different ways of sorting books: Dewey Decimal, Library of Congress, alphabetical by title, author, or genre. But this was entirely new to me:
I have often wandered into a bookstore and the owner is like, “What can I help you with?” And I’m like, ya know, I’m kind of looking for something…orange to read.”
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