Today we’re talking about one of the shop’s biggest recent book buys: about 30,000 volumes from Albany, New York. Motivated by a fear of missing out, we made the long trip and were rewarded by a house (including the kitchen cabinets) packed with vintage pulp paperbacks, art books, comics, and even some racier adult material. When you move so many books there are a lot of logistics—ten 6:00am drives, hundreds of flights of stairs, snow management, and boxes stacked to the ceiling of the Brattle’s capacious basement—but we’re happy to bring this especially fun collection to our customers. Pop by and browse it for yourself if you plan to be in Boston any time over the next few years.
Brattlecast # 135 - Big Book Hauls
When people think about the secondhand book business, they rarely think about all the literal heavy lifting that goes on behind the scenes. In this episode Ken breaks down the nitty-gritty logistics of getting 15,000 books from a three-story Victorian house outside of New Haven to the shop in downtown Boston. It takes eleven trips, employee overtime for days that start at 6am, thousands of cardboard boxes, tote bags of packing tape, a second set of clothes for when you sweat through your clothes, dust inhalation, and stairs, stairs, and yet more stairs. Learn more about how it all gets done on this laborious #brattlecast.
Brattlecast #93 - Grapefruit
Today we’re taking a look at a signed, second edition copy of Grapefruit, Yoko Ono’s pioneering work of conceptual art. Yoko Ono was a fixture of the subversive 1960’s New York underground art scene, and is most associated with the Dada-inspired Fluxus movement. First published in 1964, Grapefruit consists of a series of “event scores”, poetic, zen-influenced performance scripts that can be followed by anyone to create musical or artistic pieces. This particular copy is also signed by Ono’s husband at the time, John Lennon, who wrote the introduction to this edition and was a popular musician in his own right.