The Book Shopper

Best Buys

As many as you may know, when I am not shopping for books, I am selling books. It is a blurry line because I often shop for books to sell. Sometimes what I read is determined by what I am interested in carrying for my popup book operation Destination: Books, but I can say that I never read a book that I don't want to read. Life is too short to do that and there is just so much other good material and writers out there that I'd rather seek out.

Even though Destination: Books is a popup and online bookshop and not a bricks-and-mortar store, it is still an independent bookseller and a member of the American Bookseller Association. D:B is an affiliate and a beneficiary of the Bookshop.org program. (Bookshop.org is a collaboration between the ABA and the book wholesaler Ingram.)

For every new book purchased through the bookshop.org portal, money eventually is shared to hundreds of independent bookstore affiliates. If you purchase any new book through my specific Destination: Books portal, the store receives an additional commission. 

Check out our Destination: Books bookshopper-themed portal. It lists some of the books I have written about in the bookshopper blog or ones we have recently enjoyed.   Furthermore Bookshop.org is offering free shipping on book orders until Monday midnight, November 28, 2022.

Thanks for your support of independent reading and thinking.

 

 

New Mexico Map Shopping

Except for a quick browse of the Maya Jones Books stall in the El Museo Cultural Market adjacent the Santa Fe Farmer’s Market, I did very little book shopping on my recent trip to Santa Fe with my partner Denise and her brother and sister-in-law Mike and Kathy Koslow. (“Excuse me, sir, do you have any margarita recipe books?”)

But other printed matter came into play—maps. And appropriately so, since we road tripped through Abiquiu and Ghost Ranch up Highway 84 in a geological tour or rock formations.  I had no idea what they were about until I purchased the exquisitely printed Abiquiu: The Geologic History of O’Keefe Country by Kirt Kempter and Dick Huelster. The detailed map gives a rundown of the rock formations, the type of rock, a timeline and explanation of how the topography was formed.

Here's an excerpt about the formation near Georgia O'Keefe's Ghost Ranch (shown at the top of the post):

"The Mesozoic Era is represented by the sedentary deposits that surround Ghost Ranch. The basal, mostly red mudstones represent the Triassic Petrified Forest Formation, when broad rivers meandered across a flat landscape in northern New Mexico. The orange-red to yellow overlying cliffs represent the Entrada Formation, petrified sand dunes from the Jurassic Period approximately 165-160 million years ago."

Well, it’s not exactly the map you can follow while you are hiking but it serves well as a memory of what we experienced, not unlike this photograph of us trekking through a slot canyon near the Cerrito Blanco.

 

Focusing on Dos Passos

Three months ago, I posted on this blog “My History with The John Dos Passos Trilogy” about my long relationship with the writer and the different editions of the three books, but it didn’t stop there. With encouragement from The Gravity’s Rainbow Support Group, I pushed forward, and reread The 42nd Parallel, Nineteen Nineteen, and The Big Money.

This has led to another longer essay “The Camera Eye of Dos Passos: Looking Back at an America in Turmoil” that has just been published by the Tropics of Meta. Founded in 2010, ToM, as it affectionally known, publishes essays on history, current events and popular culture giving a wide range of latitude—including length—to its contributors. (You don’t have be an academic to write for them.)

This was my seventh essay that they have published. And I must admit all the essays germinated in some degree from The Books Shopper blog postings. A tradition continues.