DIARY OF A COUNTRY BOOKSELLER (02/13/08)
I have no argument with suicides. I know that life is not for everyone. At a very specific point along what becomes an interrupted line suicides decide that all bets are off. They decide they no longer have a dog in the fight. How they make that decision is not much of a mystery. We know that the killer is exhaustion and the weapon is contempt. As Ivan said to God in The Brothers Karamazov, "If you exist, I respectfully return my ticket."...

Diary of a Country Bookseller (01/09/08)
By Christopher Hitchens Reviewed by Dan Krotz Christopher Hitchens has written a book titled God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. It is a splendid book, witty, outrageous, funny, and occasionally erudite. It is about the fallacy and delusion of theism and it sets out to prove, in the words of Robert Pirsig that, "if one man believes something that is not real, we call it insanity. If many people believe something that is not real we call it religion."...

DIARY OF A COUNTRY BOOKSELLER (12/19/07)
I have been traveling around in the company of the number-one pop star in Laos. Her name is Phonekaseumsouk Sengsourigna and her face is on many billboards, on television in commercials and in magazine advertisements.   She is beautiful and full of energy and whenever we step off a plane or get out of a car she is met by members of her fan club who give her a bouquet of flowers. Everybody bows and giggles...

DIARY OF A COUNTRY BOOKSELLER (10/10/07)
Constant readers often connect an image, memory, or idea from one book to another book, and sometimes several.   A pastor from one of our local Methodist churches stopped by the shop the other day and bought a two-volume set of Remembrances of Things Past by Marcel Proust. I struggled not to chuckle because I connected Proust to a joke Norman Maclean told in his book, A River Runs Through It...

DIARY OF A COUNTRY BOOKSELLER (09/05/07)
John Heartbreak, famous in the small world of booksellers and perhaps my oldest friend, attended the Arkansas Booksellers Show in Little Rock recently at my encouragement. John is famous because he is known to know more about books than most human beings. We are oldest friends because we've been able to forgive one another for more than half a century...

DIARY OF A COUNTRY BOOKSELLER (08/22/07)
There isn't a lot of dirt in Carroll County. I first realized that when I naively set out to put up a fence and busted my posthole digger the minute it stuck the earth. Out came a long iron bar and, two broken shovels later, I had dug a half dozen real sorry little holes. I believe I put up the crookedest, shortest fence in Arkansas history. However, I did have an impressive pile of rocks, probably enough to build a small cathedral or a large pony barn...

Country Bookseller (08/01/07)
Doug Stowe is the Director of Wisdom of the Hands at Clear Spring School in Eureka Springs and a nationally recognized furniture maker especially known for the intricate small boxes he makes. I own all of his books and read them for instruction and for the simple pleasure of seeing how extraordinarily beautiful things are created. My favorite is Making Elegant Custom Tables...

Henry David Thoreau, Henry David Catch? (04/18/07)
For a few days after a lecture on Ralph Waldo Emerson at the Universalist Church last month, there was a brief local run on books by the Transcendentalists, chiefly Emerson, but also Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne et al. With the exception of Hawthorne, I have enjoyed these writers less and less over time...