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Calla Lily

Published February 14, 2009 Bookstore Lore , Uncategorized 2 Comments

The huge calla lily plant in our front window is again and remarkably in bloom. It’s Valentine’s Day which is sweet, but it’s also the dead middle of cold February. The shop window’s climate is one of extremes: intensely strong morning sun, still thin this time of year, then longer unheated drafty nights. A beautiful yet poisonous plant native to southern Africa, the one Diego Rivera painted in his Flower Vendor, the calla lily thrives, surprisingly, here on the eastern end of Long Island. The plant was a gift to us four years ago in celebration of our anniversary mid-March given on the first day of spring in full bloom. Perhaps this recent inflorescence proves what Katherine Hepburn uttered in Stage Door (1937): the calla lily is in bloom again; such a strange flower. She carried it on her wedding day and she’ll lay here to remember the dead. The flower of love and death, then. A heavy note for the day, yet the lily’s rich white throat glows like a small moon. We love the ones we’re with, and remember the loves we’ve lost. Our reading tonight at which poet couples read some of their favorite love poems celebrated love’s many facets, its triumphs and challenges. Happy Valentine’s Day!

Lucky Solstice

Published December 20, 2008 Bookstore Lore , Italian literature , Novelists , Poetry 1 Comment

You could say the luck began back around Thanksgiving time. Mark Doty had been announced the winner of the National Book Award for his poetry collection Fire to Fire. We’d already scheduled a reading from his memoir Dog Years. How fortuitous now that our audience could congratulate him on this great honor. When the poet read from his memoir, he read each word with the breath and sound of poetry. Just now an old golden lab and a young man are walking through the light snowfall on upper Main Street, Sag Harbor. A sign of Beau, perhaps? or just another daily ritual of caring this dark afternoon? Mark spent time with each question from the audience, answered each generously, encouragingly, the poet teacher sharing his gifts. Here, he seemed to say, you try…

Some weeks later, storyteller and novelist Gioia Timpanelli lit the candles for Santa Lucia on her feast day, December 13. The patron saint of Siracusa offered her eyes to the world. “Here,” she might have said, “take them, and see.” Gioia’s new novel What Makes a Child Lucky takes place in Sicily, in a time of great hunger, or as the introduction suggests: “anyplace at anytime.” Gioia spun out the story as we sat rapt in its charms. Lucky us, we were able to make an audio recording thanks again to Tony Ernst at WPKN independent radio. Check the link for this and other special programs: http://eastendink.blogspot.com

Books bring light to our lives. .. Bright Solstice to all!

The legacy of a book

Published August 14, 2008 Bookstore Lore Leave a Comment
Tags: personal libraries

A personal library is something like a fingerprint, unique, idiosyncratic, revealing. One’s book collection developed over decades is like a mosaic of that life, the patient creation of a reader’s quest for truth, beauty, knowledge. When that reader dies, the books may wait untended, unread. Eventually, a lucky few may find their way into new homes, into eager hands, fitting into new libraries one by one. A young man wandered into the shop one afternoon in search of just the right book for his mother. Something in history, something about New York. He found a thick volume about life among the New York intelligentsia at the turn of the century, just what his mother was interested in. That book along with boxes of others had recently been acquired from the estate of a distinguished biographer and professor of history at Columbia University. The professor’s son had hoped his father’s books might find their way to other interested readers. Several days later a woman called the shop so appreciative of the book her son had brought her. A historian herself, she was eager to learn about that book’s former owner. She’d planned to insert a provenance card into the volume acknowledging the previous owner, thereby preserving a tradition, continuing a legacy. We couldn’t imagine a better home for such a book.

Through the big blue door

Published July 19, 2008 Bookselling in the 21st century , Bookstore Lore , Uncategorized Leave a Comment
Tags: Add new tag, Bookstore Lore

We’ve been visited by old-timers who remember the place that in the late ’30s sold penny candy and sodas at the corner of Glover and Main where our bookshop has made its home since 1980. We’ve heard from others about the back room where teenagers came to watch t.v. in the ’50s and maybe drink some beer. Some variety of religious thrift shop sold old clothes and odds and ends here. Then Canio Pavone transformed the space into the literary gathering place and the eclectic shop Canio’s Books is today. We’ve heard rumors the huge basement was once a speak-easy during Prohibition, but then, it’s likely most any large underground rooms served a similar purpose in this port town. Access to Sag Harbor Cove through the trees out back may even have provided a clandestine route to transport the rum. In the mid to late 1850s, the building was once owned by a certain Reverend William Musgrave, minister at Christ Episcopal Church in Sag Harbor village. And the wide floorboards in back are said to be part of the original structure which dates from the late 1790s. We have yet to hear from any ghosts. But the voices of so many writers, poets, novelists and playwrights who have read at the shop have now seeped into the walls that the stories they could tell would likely continue for a long long while.

David’s Desk

Published May 31, 2008 Bookstore Lore , Poetry Leave a Comment
Tags: book-binding, David Ignatow

It’s more than just a checkout counter. In fact, we don’t even call it that. It’s the front desk, but it’s not just any desk. It’s David’s desk. It is old. Its big blocky shape measures almost three by five feet. Its veneer is only lately starting to chip. Within each brass knob, a sunflower radiates. Two pull-out shelves allow us extra work space since the desktop is usually stacked with book catalogs, copies of PW magazine, and of course, books we’re featuring. Terms like “point of purchase” might be more familiar to some of our marketing friends, but we know it as the former writing desk of the poet David Ignatow. A generous gift from his daughter Yaedi, we received the desk sometime after the poet’s death and are proud to have it command its rightful spot in the shop. You could say the desk has found a comfortable home here, one that may even be a bit familiar to it, if it could sense such things. This desk had been in the family book-binding business in New York City in the late 1920s and 30s. Having endured the Great Depression, the business continued for decades. Those were the days when books were objects to be folded, collated, stitched and trimmed, then packed for distribution. David had the pleasure of taking on one of Paul Blackburn’s chapbooks, The Nets, which he bound for free. See Ignatow’s One Among the Many: a Poet’s Memoirs for more of his reflections.

In later years, David Ignatow was one of the many poets to read at the bookshop and his volumes are included in our poetry collection: Ignatow Poems: 1934-1969, for example. Meanwhile, the desk gets a daily workout. Drawers opening and closing. The cash drawer. The supplies drawer. The big file drawer, its dovetailed corners just beginning to show some gaps, still serves as a reminder of a tradition we hope to maintain. Hard work for the sake of books does have its rewards.

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