mjp
Founding member
Red
- Thread starter skbruce
- Start date
No, Bukowski would hate all of US - clearly, I waste time on the internet, too. Need proof? I'm doing it right now.
Pogue Mahone
Officials say drugs may have played a part
He let me in the back once, and he had a lot of Bukowski back stock. He also kept a bunch of stuff at his house.
He sold a ton of Miller, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Faulkner, Hemingway, Selby etc. I bought a couple of Joseph Mitchell firsts from him too.
He also sold BSP authors like Lewis, Fante and Wanda Coleman. There was also a small press section with s.a. griffin type stuff. Red was definitely an antiquarian bookman who specialized in Bukowski. There were also a couple of "celebrity" signed framed pictures. Tom Waits was one for sure.
As for the assholes at Book Soup. Duttons and the rest, who gives a shit what they thought. Aldine's in east Hollywood also had some used Buk once in awhile.
He sold a ton of Miller, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Faulkner, Hemingway, Selby etc. I bought a couple of Joseph Mitchell firsts from him too.
He also sold BSP authors like Lewis, Fante and Wanda Coleman. There was also a small press section with s.a. griffin type stuff. Red was definitely an antiquarian bookman who specialized in Bukowski. There were also a couple of "celebrity" signed framed pictures. Tom Waits was one for sure.
As for the assholes at Book Soup. Duttons and the rest, who gives a shit what they thought. Aldine's in east Hollywood also had some used Buk once in awhile.
mjp
Founding member
Imagine working at Crown Books and having an attitude about anything.
"Sure, I'll sell you these dusty old overstock cookbooks, the I HATE MONDAYS coffee mug, this Enya CD and the Sexy Firefighters of Pomona calendar, but not Bukowski! Never!"
I'm not giving up my mug. Fuck you.
I've actually known S.A since the early '90s, if I had to put an exact date on it, I'd guess 1993. I was invited to (and attended) a poetry reading S.A. gave at Beyond Baroque (not to be confused with Baroque Books) around '94 or '95. That said, my best friend knows S.A. a lot better than I do.
The last time I saw S.A. was probably about a year and a half ago. I didn't know he had any connection with Bukowski until Bukowski was already dead. I thought it was pretty cool when I saw S.A. giving a speech on one of those Bukowski DVDs (the one with the features from the Huntington Library).
I used to work at Crown Books, and can assure you that your assessment of the place is absolutely correct. Not only did we not sell any Bukowski, but we also didn't have any Baudelaire, Rimbaud, or anything of that nature. The closest we probably got was Rilke.
I'd hate it when someone would come in and ask for a GOOD book, as this meant I always had to apologize for not stocking it and turn them away. I started referring customers to places like Red's until my manager noticed and chastised me about "sending customers to our competitors" - after that, I'd have to make any suggestions on the sly.
I'd usually tell the customer "I'm not sure we have that, let's go look at the shelves" - once there, and out of earshot of my manager, I'd tell the customer what store they needed to go to.
But by FAR, our most popular items that we'd sell were these huge coffee table books that had some kind of celebrity tie-in. I can't remember any actual titles, but the books were of the "Martha Stewart's Holiday Recipes" or "Rachel Ray's Christmas Scrapbook" variety. Big, heavy, full color books that sold for something like 60 bucks apiece.
These rich women would come in and buy a stack of twenty of the same book to give one to each of their friends for Christmas. I swear, we could have sold ONLY these kind of books and the store's profits would have remained pretty much the same. We sold a metric SHIT-TON of those books.
That said, nobody at MY Crown ever gave snarky responses about Bukowski, due to the fact that my co-workers at Crown Books had never even heard of Bukowski.
mjp
Founding member
He didn't.
He has created a posthumous connection by showing up to any public gathering with Bukowski's name on it and doing readings of Bukowski poems that some might consider unpleasantly clueless.
Okay, you caught me. It's me. I find them unpleasantly clueless.
I typed a lot more about the