We got our fourth batch of West Philly Sinkhole buttons in Saturday, featuring the iconic image of the sinkhole swallowing a trolley car. The designer informs us that this is the last batch.
We also have vinyl sinkhole stickers, which arrived in time for the Water Department’s presentation on the history of Mill Creek (which meanders underground through West Philly; the sinkholes result from its struggles against the concrete that imprisons it) at USP.
These are our top-selling titles for the last month:
adrienne maree brown, ed., Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good
Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now
bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions
Aaron Becker, You Are Light (picture book)
Maggie Nelson, Shiner (poetry)
Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous: A Novel
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow
adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties: Stories
Roxanne Gay, Bad Feminist: Essays
Oliver Narelle, Tide Pool Secrets (picture book)
Joe Hayes, Watch Out for Clever Women / Cuidado con las mujeres astutas (chapter book)
Zetta Elliott, Melena’s Jubilee (picture book)
Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America : Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent
G Willow Wilson,The Bird King (novel)
The New York Times reports that an investment firm best known for buying up Argentine bonds after the country had defaulted and then pursuing the country in courts around the world until a new administration agreed to pay – Elliott Advisors made some $2 billion on the deal – has bought the U.S.’s largest book chain, Barnes & Noble.
Elliott will place B&N under the management of the CEO of British bookstore chain Waterstones, which it bought in June 2018. (Waterstones operate more than 280 stores; its annual total and per-store sales are dwarfed by B&N’s.)
Although it operates hundreds fewer stores than it did at its peak, B&N remains the country’s largest book chain, with 627 stores. #2 Books-A-Million operates some 260 stores, primarily in the South. #3 Half-Price Books (a Midwestern and Southern chain specializing in discounted titles) operates about 125 stores. B&N sales have been falling in recent years (and it lost many hundreds of millions on its online operation and its efforts to move into ebooks); Amazon.com now has higher book revenues.
Elliott is controlled by Paul Singer, a financier and major Republican donor who donated $1 million to the Trump inauguration.
This Thursday, June 6, is the first Dollar Stroll of 2019, from 5:30 pm to 8ish, up and down Baltimore Avenue. We will have several new books for $1, a dollar clearance sale on our 2019 calendars, and a bit of contortion. The bookstore will be open until 8 p.m.
