New locally edited art/architecture/urban planning/design anthology published by our friends over at Blueimprint. Highlights: Stacey Moriarty's photographs of blackberry vines busily colonizing vacant lots, deserted building sites & etc., and Lindsay Sung's pictures of anthropomorphic hedges. Plus essays on volcanic rock, mountain skylines, Expo 86 relics, mirrored glass, "ghost buildings," and more. Full list of contributors here. Highly recommended!

Photos from Jan Guenther Braun's reading

(All photographs by and courtesy of Marlis Funk)

Best of the City

Thanks to the readers of the West Ender newspaper for once again voting us "Best Place to Buy Used Books in Vancouver" in their annual Readers' Choice Awards.

George Stanley's Vancouver: A Poem

The Tyee's Stan Persky reviews George Stanley's Vancouver: A Poem (New Star, 2008), which was launched in the front room of our Main Street store last fall, along with Peter Culley's new book of poems, The Age of Briggs and Stratton.

"Stanley's Vancouver is a book about the mind of a poet -- a poet in Vancouver, as it happens -- and about Vancouver, a city that appears in passing glances, by refraction, sometimes from a distance (say, from an office window at the North Vancouver college, on the far side of Burrard Inlet, where Stanley taught literature), most often from within the city's busses, pubs, restaurants and department stores, and in such ordinary places as the lobby of an apartment building in Kitsilano, a building where 'the seniors in their apartments' are 'waiting for a moment' in the late afternoon.

At other times the city sits there in stolid silence, its buildings weighty as the mountains north of Vancouver in which 'we see two rocks, & call them Lions,' Stanley says, and later notes, 'like lions sculpted by some Assyrian or Henry Moore.' Then looking away from the mountains, back toward Vancouver, he adds, 'City of death, city of friends.'"

RIP Philip Jose Farmer

Philip Jose Farmer, author of the Riverworld books, good critical biographies of Doc Savage and Tarzan, and (as Kilgore Trout) Venus on The Half Shell, a book that most people think was actually written by Kurt Vonnegut, died today aged 91. Like his fellow science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon, Farmer coupled his love of pulpy subject matter with good critical judgment. And his comparison of assorted Doc Savage villains to William S. Burroughs' Nova Mob got me from Kenneth Robeson to Burroughs' Nova Trilogy aged fourteen or thereabouts, a gift I'll always be gratetful for.

Edgar Rice Burroughs: Mars, Venus, Westerns & More

We just bought a nice collection of Edgar Rice Burroughs titles, including some uncommon Westerns and some old Ace Books F-series mass market paperbacks from the early 1960s. About 30 titles in all, many with Frank Frazetta cover art. Burroughs' Tarzan titles seem to have had their day, but his John Carter of Mars series still sells well, perhaps because its characters make cameo appearances in Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Andrew Stanton, writer/director of Wall-E, is also apparently working on an animated John Carter movie. A related Burroughs series, Carson Napier of Venus, also sells well; again, many of the early Ace Venus books sport beautiful pastel-colored painted covers.

There are some pretty ugly print-on-demand versions of Burroughs' work available at the moment, so it's unsurprising that most readers prefer the classier old Ace editions.

We just finished helping a lost delivery driver find the Main Street store. In the back of his truck was a pallet of remainders (new books returned to publishers and sold by us at approximately one-third to one-half their original Canadian cover price) to be divided between the Main Street and Kitsilano stores, including titles by Lacan, Rilke, Ryu Murakami, and about a hundred pounds of miscellaneous Shambhala Press books on Zen Buddhism, Japanese swordsmanship, and Asian martial arts.

It's pretty full in here this afternoon.