Sarah's Books - Used & Rare

I've had a busy few days at the shop, full of bookish conversations and even sales - I finally have all the books from last week's library sale out on the shelves (except the stack I inevitably want to take home and read), and I've even sold some of them already. Highlights from the sales slips this past week at Sarah's Books: Lattimore's Iliad, a Shel Silverstein book, a fine stack of cookery books to my pal Nick, another good pile to Bob, who buys books on civil rights and censorship issues, then Adam bought art books (on Pop Art, Jasper Johns, and a book on the art and archaeology of Mesopotamia), I also sold Steinbeck's A Russian Journal, a collection of Hemingway's short stories, Woolf's To the Lighthouse, a Penguin Thucydides, a few Paul Theroux travel books, a biography of conservationist Aldo Leopold, a biography of Sitting Bull, Flannery O'Connor's Complete Stories, the list goes on and on. Business always picks up this time of year, with the approaching Memorial Day weekend marking the early start of the tourist season here in Maine (the official start is really the Fourth of July, but smart folks come in June, a season of much beauty and few crowds at the coast).

Besides being busy at the shop, I've been galavanting about doing other things. Last night I went to the Willie Nelson concert here in town at our local auditorium. Over thirty songs in about two and a half hours - the best, what really moved me, were Night Life, a very bluesy Me and Bobby McGee, a trio of Hank Williams songs: Jambalaya, Hey Good Lookin', and Move It On Over (one of my favorite Hank songs ever), a Merle Haggard tribute, Townes Van Zandt's Pancho and Lefty, and the Cindy Walker song You Don't Know Me. He had a gigantic Texas flag unfurled at the back of the stage, and flung various cowboy hats and bandanas out to the crowd periodically, and was generally looking pretty happy. I read somewhere recently that people ask Willie when he's going to retire, and he says all he does is play music and play golf, and which do they want him to give up? Ryan and I talked to a pal of ours from the Bangor Daily News who told us that Willie had given over $13,000 worth of tickets to the troop greeters (a group of local folks who meet incoming military flights at Bangor International Airport, which is a common first landing site for soldiers coming back to the U.S. after tours of duty). The concert was great for people-watching - the crowd was made up of everyone from sweet little old couples holding hands to young hippie-dippie kids with dreadlocks to middle-aged bikers with their country-attired girlfriends with cowboy hats and long fringe flying. Everybody had a good time, me included, and I'm glad I got to see a real American patriot and legend.

In other news, the opening for the group art show I am part of (see post below) happened last weekend. The place was packed, and amidst the copious pouring of wine and eating of lobster-based finger foods one of my paintings sold, to a collector of Maine art. My first sale ever in a gallery... it was both exciting and encouraging. I was happy to even be in the show, which is made up of work from a group of artists I met last summer at an art retreat, the first I'd ever been to. The show felt like an extension of that experience, and I got to visit with some of the people I hadn't seen since last summer, so all in all, a great time.

Meanwhile, the week careens on - Ryan and my brother-in-law are running the Vermont City Marathon this weekend in Burlington, so I'm getting ready for our trip, and of course thinking about possible bookshops to visit en route. Never forget: it's all about the books.