Thursday, March 06, 2008

Do You Feel Lucky, Punk?

Flying Off the Shelves - Books - The Stranger, Seattle's Only Newspaper: "In my eight years working at an independent bookstore, I lost count of how many shoplifters I chased through the streets of Seattle while shouting 'Drop the book!' I chased them down crowded pedestrian plazas in the afternoon, I chased them through alleys at night, I even chased one into a train tunnel. I chased a book thief to the waterfront, where he shouted, 'Here are your fucking books!' and threw a half-dozen paperbacks, including Bomb the Suburbs and A People's History of the United States, into Puget Sound, preferring to watch them slowly sink into the muck rather than hand them back to the bookseller they were stolen from. He had that ferocious, orgasmic gleam in his eye of somebody who was living in the climax of his own movie: I suppose he felt like he was liberating them somehow."

1 comment:

Dave Zeltserman said...

When Spensers Mystery Bookstore was around in Boston I used to talk with the owner quite a bit, and he told for whatever reason, the Jim Thompson books were stolen more frequently than any other books.