Destination: Books

End of Summer Sale

Call it an end-of-summer sale or an inventory reduction sale, but many of our books will be marked down at our next popup at the Freedom Farmer's Market at the Carter Center, Saturday morning, September 21st.

Tallamy at the Atlanta Botanical Garden

Few authors in the gardening/sustainability space have been as impactful as Douglas Tallamy. His two books Nature's Best Hope and Bringing Nature Home promote the idea that individuals can each do their part to restore habitats in small spaces by planting native plants which allow native insects to survive and provide food sources for birds and other wildlife. 

On a personal level, reading Nature's Best Hope inspired me to try to restore a dead, mostly eroded area between my housing development and the Decatur Cemetery. For the past several years, I cleaned out old remnants of building materials, added soil, amended it with alpaca manure and planted wildflowers and herbs to hold the soil. 

My neighbors have responded with their appreciation and the HOA paid for extending a water line and faucet that I can attach a hose for watering when the plants get too dry (though I try to grow plants that do not require a lot of watering). I started some plants from seed, (I learned how at the Wylde Center) but friends have given me others such as Joe-pye -weed, Rattlesnake-weed, Mountain mint, milkweed and Goldenrod, all which have thrived. Coneflowers and Black-eyed-Susans not so much.  

So not everything has worked and some weeds like mimosa want to take over, but the improvements have been noticeable. It all started with the Tallamy book, but I have still have a long way to go to match the Atlanta Botanical Garden (on the left).

Tallamy will be leading the discussion as part of the Fuqua Lecture series at the Atlanta Botanical Garden beginning at 7 p.m. Tuesday, September 18th. If you cannot attend the lecture, it will be broadcast live. See the Garden's events page for details. If you're interested in either one of the books check out the online version of Destination: Books where both books are listed. 

 

Anthropomorphic Plants

Lately as I drink my morning coffee on my deck, I have been watching this morning glory (which I intentionally planted though considered invasive) make its way up a support pole, across to this dragon fly lawn ornament before jutting out to wide open spaces.  I ask it, "Where are you going, morning glory?"

Previously, I didn't understand how it navigates until I read Zoë Schlanger's The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth. The book explores the hidden world of plant intelligence, their ability to communicate, socialize and to hear sounds.  

With respect to sounds, Schlanger explains how climbing vines (like my morning glories, my peas and cucumbers) know where to climb. There is research that shows plants utilize a kind of echolocation (sonar --like bats) to sense where to position themselves to grab onto something solid.

This is just the beginning tip of the book's reach. It even made my little book group's read and discuss list. (Complete notes about this book can be found at GRSG Reading Notes 2024 but you will have to scroll down the page.)

And finally a shout out to those regulars who visit our pop-up book booth at the Freedom Farmer's Market at the Carter Center for putting this book on my radar. Btw, our next pop-up is scheduled for Saturday morning August 24th.

Available at https://bookshop.org/shop/destinationbooks

Bee That Time of Year

Friday, August 23rd and Saturday, August 24th is bee and butterfly counting time. Organized by the University of Georgia Extension Service, residents of the Southeast including Georgia are encouraged to record the number and type pollinators that visit their gardens. The Great Southeast Pollinator Census website has all the details for gathering and sharing data including scorecards that identify the insects. 

(I already checked out the mountain mint [ Pycanthemum spp.] that I planted last year in the back of my development. And judging from this recent photo, I better bring a tally counter.)

If you want to dive deeper into the world of bees and butterflies, Destination: Books carries reference books at its online store (shown below). Powered by Bookshop.org, books purchased here raises money for local bookstores -- even pop-ups like this one.

https://bookshop.org/shop/destinationbooks

 

Vacation or Research

Following up from the last posting, when I was in Paris, I visited the Marché d'Aligre market near the Bastille monument in 12th Arrondissement. Adjacent the market is a shop that specializes in the sales of heirloom seeds.

In addition to coffee, fruits, cheeses, vegetables and pastries, the market also had a flea market component.  There was also a long table of used books. Ideal for browsing, but I shuddered thinking if I had to pack and unpack those books every weekend.

 Destination: Books is planning to be at the Freedom Farmer's Market at the Carter Center in Atlanta on Saturday morning (7/27).  This market also has coffee, fruits, cheeses, vegetables, pastries and this week—weather permitting—books.

 

 

Destination Books Visits France

Things have been quiet here lately at Destination: Books as we have been touring parts of Europe the past month.  Books are always a part of our travel experiences, and this one was no different.

In Paris, my book loving partner Denise and I visited the most famous pop-up booksellers in the world, the bouquinistes who have been selling books in their stalls along the Seine River since the mid-1600s. They tried to move the booksellers for the 2024 Olympics, but booklovers and traditionalists would have none of it. See this article in Smithsonian Magazine. 

Our timing wasn't so good as many of the stalls were closed because of the windy and misty weather. (We understand.) The few stalls that were open briefly had mostly secondhand books, posters, cards and such.  I didn’t glean any takeaways on merchandising, but Destination: Books did notice some similarities. Like the bouquinistes, we enjoy talking books with our regulars and the out-of-towners visiting the Freedom Farmer’s Market at the Carter Center here in Atlanta for the first time.

Weather permitting, we will at Carter Center on Saturday morning, July 20^th to resume our bookselling traditions but sans beret, of course.

New Arrivals

Several books will be making their Freedom Farmers Market debut on Saturday morning June 8th at the Carter Center in Atlanta.

Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories by Amitav Ghosh.

This may seem like a stretch for our booth, but Ghosh is a novelist who has written extensively about the 1840 opium wars in his Isis Trilogy. In Smoke and Ashes he leverages his extensive knowledge of opium's global history and its unfathomable ramifications. One of Ghosh’s themes in his books is how botany can drive human history whether it be opium poppies, tea, tobacco, or cotton. And don’t forget fossil fuels which were formed by microscopic dead plants and animals (albeit millions of years ago).

Then there is the human element. Think about this quote from the book:

"They (giant energy corporations) have shown (through the spread of disinformation about climate change) that they are literally willing to take ‘anything goes’ to the point of creating a catastrophe for all of humanity, just as opium traders were once willing to let millions of people fall into addiction on the pretext that there existed a law of the market that dictated it."

We will also have in stock a copy of Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis.

Milkweed Lands: An Epic Story of One Plant by Eric Lee-Mader

One of our regulars recommended this book to us and she was right. It is a gorgeously illustrated book (art by Beverly Duncan) on the amazing milkweed. A staple in any backyard space that wants to attract butterflies and bees. Inspirational.

Vertical Gardening: Green Ideas for Small Gardens, Balconies and Patios by Martin Staffler

This is an addition to the small library of books that we carry regularly for those urban gardeners that don’t have much space beyond their deck or balcony.  You can join the Patio-to-Table movement with flowers, herbs or vegetables with encouragement from Destination: Books.

 

You can find these books and others online at https://bookshop.org/shop/destinationbooks.

A Gift Idea for Father

One of the indulgences of being a bookseller is that you can sell your own books. Ann Patchett does it (Parnassus books in Nashville) Destination: Books does it too. My offering is A Father’s Letters: Connecting Past to Present which is a book I finished writing six months ago.

It’s a short book—like a thick chapbook—but it has relevance at this time of year. The book begins with your narrator at the threshold of retirement and asking myself what should I do next?  Well, retirement did give me the time to look at the hundreds of letters that my father wrote to his parents while he was a combat infantryman in Europe during the winter of 1944 and the letters he wrote to me while I was young man just out of college in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

It’s a book about fathers—and the men who served in World War II—and how I gleaned insights into this stage of my life through these letters written decades ago.

Availability

The book is always available at the Destination: Books popup book sales. My next scheduled outing is at the Carter Center's  Freedom Farmer’s Market in Atlanta on Saturday morning, June 8th. (We may be at Pepper Place in Birmingham on Saturday morning, June 1st too in the Bonnybee Designs booth. She's my daughter. It's a a father-daughter thing.)

Also, Destination Books keeps a “permanent popup” booth of about 30 books at the Guild+ Journeyman Bike and Coffee shop on Claremont Avenue just north of the Old Courthouse in downtown Decatur (display shown below).

The book is also available online through Ingram’s Bookshop program or if you must Amazon.

The Weekly Weeder

At this Saturday morning's (5/11) popup at the Freedom Farmers Market at the Carter Center I will be bringing my collectible copy of Ryan Gainey’s spiral bound illustrated 18-page poster-like book The Weekly Weeder. What makes the book a collectible is that it was signed by Gainey himself.  It is gorgeously illustrated in full color by The Count Beauregard DuBois.

The Story Behind It (or its provenance)

On Easter Sunday, 2015, my partner Denise and I toured Gainey’s home gardens on Emerson Avenue in Decatur. We were walking by his home and Gainey was in his backyard with his dogs and invited us (for a small donation) to leisurely tour his gardens, which was well worth it.  When he finished our stroll, he pitched The Weekly Weeder to us, we thought “Why not?” because it was the most amazing private garden we had ever seen or seen since. He was very pleased at our purchase and chatted at length while he signed the book in elegant cursive.

It’s been on our shelves for a while, and it seems it should belong to a passionate fan of this legendary landscaper designer who lived large. There is a documentary about him entitled “The Well-Placed Weed”.

The book will be priced at $75 (on site only). You can purchase it online at my Alibris store here. 

We look forward to our monthly show and tell on Saturday.

 

Have You Read All These Books

At last Saturday's popup at the Wylde Center's Spring Garden Plant sale, a bright, book-loving 4th grader asked me, "Have you read all these books?" 

It is a fair question and one that I am occasionally asked. My answer is "Some of them, but not all of them."

Reference books on butterflies, bees, birds and gardening techniques, don't require page by page reading, but essay or long form type books on various related topics such as women in nature, climate policy and the current one I am reading Henry Grabar's Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World do require some vetting. In short, the Grabar book reminds me of Tom Vanderbilt's Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do.

I am only about a third of the way through the book and I am pleasantly surprised. On the surface, the author has taken on a dull topic but he has made it relative, informative and deserving of some thought. And it has its lighter moments too including Jerry Seinfeld's joke about parking in Manhattan, "It's like musical chairs except everyone sat down in 1964."

On Saturday morning, April 20th we will be at Carter Center's Freedom Farmer's Market with our books and ready to field any questions. But in the words of a smart ass tour guide I once had in Europe, "Please don't ask me anything I cannot answer." Of course the guide was serious, but I am not.

NOTE: Last week we mentioned we were going to be at the Avondale Estates Earth Day  festivities on Sunday, April 21st, but the planners have canceled the event.