What I Look For at Used Bookstores: A Category Analysis

We have a rule in my house that whenever we want new books we have to take back the same number of old ones to the used bookstore. This is hard. Because some books we want to keep–to read again, for some sort of perceived prestige (I guess), to read for the first time (hey D.H. Lawrence), and because we…like books? But it creates a stasis somewhat equivalent to the amount of bookshelf space we have, but I’m able to […]

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Dandies Occupy Savile Row

An Abercrombie and Fitch setting up shop on London’s Savile Row is sort of like a McDonald’s opening up next door to a farm operated by an anarchist vegan collective–it’s insulting.  We’ve talked about how far the clothing chain has fallen from the days when it used to be the first stop Hemingway made when he visited New York, but opening up on one of the world’s most famous sartorial sites has caught the attention of the last group of people you’d imagine […]

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Pencils Have Their Day

“Someone at the office suggested I try a mechanical pencil, but I found it soulless. For a while, I was scraping along with four art pencils when a fellow pencil enthusiast, browsing on pencils.com, discovered that the Blackwing—black, with a distinctive flat eraser—had come back on the market.” – Mary Norris at The New Yorker discusses her life in pencils. 

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