Memo to the guy scanning books with his cell phone in our science section

You can now browse books before you buy them from amazon at one of amazon's new retail showrooms! There's one in the 1300 block of Ninth Street...

Break out of the amazon jail!

The Regulator is now selling Kobo e-books and Kobo's state of the art e-book readers.

In the international e-book market, Kobo (a Canadian company) are #1 in places like France, Australia, Canada, and the Netherlands, and they are #2 in the U.K. They currently have more than 10 million registered users in 190 countries, and one of the largest e-book stores in the world, with more than 3 million books, newspapers, and magazines.

Kobo’s Read Freely philosophy supports an open platform that ensures that people actually own the books they buy and are never locked to one device or service (unlike amazon’s e-books and their kindles). Kobo offers free eReading apps so people can read anytime, anyplace, from a device they already own—be it an iPad, iPhone, Android tablet or phone, Mac, PC, Nook, or any Kobo eReader.

Now is the time to break out of the amazon jail! Why use a device that locks you down to “buying” all your e-books from one place? (You wouldn’t buy a DVD player that that would only play DVDs that you bought from one place. So what are you doing with that kindle?).

Our prices and our devices are competitive. You can read digitally and shop locally. You can actually own the e-books you buy.

We still like real books the best. But for those of you reading digitally, our advice is:  Get out of jail! Read Freely! And Shop Local, y’all.

"all good novels are political"

"Novels are political...because good fiction is about identifying with and understanding people who are not necessarily like us. By nature, all good novels are political because identifying with the other is political. At the heart of the 'art of the novel' lies the human capacity to see the world through others' eyes. Compassion is the greatest strength of the novelist."

--The Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, in an interview in the New York Times Book Review, Nov. 11, 2012.

“Nothing beats a good book”

“Nothing beats a good book”

That’s a direct quote from one of our steady customers, who had just picked up a new book from one of her favorite authors. Though even a hard core book lover like myself might want to qualify that statement a bit (a good meal with good friends? an intimate relationship?), I know exactly what she was talking about. Especially on the long, cold, dark nights of winter, what can be better than getting warm and cozy with a good book in your hands?  

Much has changed since that long-ago day 36 years ago when we first began peddling books here on Ninth Street. Yet some fundamental things remain the same. The satisfaction we get in putting the right book, at the right time, in the right person’s hands. The joy of listening to parents read aloud to their children while sharing our back sofas. (If we only had recordings!). The pleasure of hearing authors read and talk about their books with passion, grace, wit and intelligence. And a leisurely browse in a good bookstore is still, we feel, one of life’s great treats.

In these days of constant digital distraction, we humbly suggest standing E. M. Forster’s advice on its head. Only disconnect. For a while. Remember how to relax again without peering into a screen. You just might discover, to your great benefit, that there are indeed times when “nothing beats a good book.” ---Tom Campbell

Chocolate Covered Cherries at The Regulator?

What are chocolate covered cherries doing at The Regulator? Well, as the saying goes, folks don't live by bread alone. They don't even live by bread and books alone. But when you bring books and good chocolate together, you're getting somewhere. Stop by Bean Traders and add a cup of coffee, or add a bottle of wine from Wine Authorities, and you're really getting somewhere, in my humble opinion.

I was somewhere in Seattle last month when I came across these locally made (for Seattle, that is), incredibly good chocolate covered cherries. The Pinot Noir and the Cabernet are my favorites, but there are more to choose from.

So now you can get your books and your chocolate at The Regulator. And while they last, we have some samples you can try--if I can keep our staff from eating them all.

And speaking of samples, if you know of other excellent, independently made chocolates from other parts of the U.S., we'd be glad to hear about them--and try them! This could be the start of something...

"It is a truth universally acknowledged.."

...that a single man (or woman) in possession of a good fortune, must want to spend it at The Regulator Bookshop."

with all due respect to Jane Austen, and to Mr B's Emporium of Reading Delights in Bath, England, from who we stole this quote: http://www.mrbsemporium.com/ 

Only two hours until Katy Munger leads our Blast From the Past Reading series, discussing Pride and Prejudice!

You can't tell a book by its cover--and maybe not from its reviews, either

The review from The New Yorker:
"(The author) wallows in his own laughter and finally drowns in it..."

The review from the Atlantic Monthly:
"There is a difference, after all, between milking a joke (the great gift of the old comedians) and stretching it out till you kill it..."

The review from the New York Times:
"...it gasps for want of craft and sensibility...The book is an emotional hodgepodge, no mood is sustained long enough to register for more than a chapter..."

The book in question, arriving to these terrible reviews, was published back in 1961.

A book that was this bad, published more than 50 years ago--it would figure that it soon sank from view. Who would know about it today? Well, you might be surprised. The book was Joseph Heller's Catch 22.

(Review quotes from Rotten Reviews Redux: A Literary Companion, edited by Bill Henderson. Pushcart Press, hardback, $18.95)