The Haunted Bookshop

Such a brilliant thing to do for them! 😊

We ❤️ Subterranean, and we're also big fans of signed/limited letterpress poetry, illustrators' signatures (often works of art themselves)... I just hate to see people starting out with expectations that the market can't fulfill.

They start by telling me they're calling about my account (that I don't have) or are calling about my application (that I have never made) or my existing services (that I have through someone else).

Please don't turn around and tell the author about that, as though they somehow devalued their own signature. It's not their fault that the industry is currently heavily invested in author tours and signings.

Get the signatures you want for yourself. Your collection's greatest value is to you 📚❤️

Sigh.

The reason that recent signed books are not very valuable is because in America, there are more people trying to make a profit on signatures than there are people who appreciate them.

Someday, if you keep it in perfect condition, your newly signed book will be worth... the jacket price.

👏 This is the way. I just wish they'd waste less of our time!

You ever get the ones that call right back and say "well I was going to buy (something) from you, but I don't shop at places where people are so rude!" 🙄

There are an incredible number of scammers out there who call small businesses multiple times a day, trying to get different employees, to see if they can get information or a direct line to the manager/owner 😩

Fake lenders, QuickBooks techs, merchant processing, business phone system reps...

Not as much as you might expect by volume, but more than you'd think for their weight 😜

People order from us. This is a used book shop, and we sell on our website and on Biblio and Alibris.

Agreed 💯 - love to reward good customers, but have to be reasonable too.

Of course you know about Parker. I should have assumed as much 😂 I'll have to noodle the McCloskey comparison.

Thanks for the links! I may end up describing the book as "Beatrix Potter for the Chim-Chiminey set", though I may add something about Steig too. There's just nothing about this story that apologizes for, or even introduces, itself. Zero to wacky in three lines of text!

Ma'am. This is a Wendy's

Thank you! Welcome! 😊

And there's a page on which one character fills another in on the smogger they use to warn each other of baddies about town, which involves whistling bird calls.

Then the neighborhood gets gentrified, and the tomcat reforms, and I get "Daisy, Daisy" stuck in my head.

The End.

The story opens, quite cinematically, with a rascally poodle being scared out of the barbershop by the news that a mean stoat is back in town.

Various well-dressed not-so-gentle-varmints try to avoid the weasel's machinations.

There's a comic bit with a chameleon and the Greek alphabet?

Any of my Internet acquaintances familiar with author Edgar Parker (1925-1982)?

I'm sitting here with a copy of his "Rogue's Gallery" (Pantheon, 1969), trying to write a summary.

The illustrations look like charcoal sketches of taxidermied animals mixed with a gentleman's fashion magazine.

Nah, somebody's got to stick around and keep the humans in line 😸

“Free” shipping is free like free lunch. It’s a real issue for small businesses that can’t just eat the cost (or, more accurately, obfuscate how they pass it on to consumers).

We used to have a cat who would actually pose if he heard a camera shutter. Our Insta was half pictures of him 🙄

That reminds me, I do need to set up a way for people to text us book requests! Then you could just transcribe the planchette's activity right into your phone 😂

But remember, the reason "free shipping" even became a thing is because the really big websites don't want you to see how they work.

They want you to think they just invisibly deposit things on your doorstep... because then you'll stop thinking about how much you're spending.

👆 exactly. We could slap a filter on our database to raise our book prices on our website, then offer free shipping.

We don't, because so many people now pre-shop our website before coming in, and I don't want them to end up staying away because they think we charge $12 for a $6 book.

Your $5.50 at our website covers:

- $5.22 Media Mail for 1.2lb (average) book
- $3.00 labor costs to package
- $0.75 packaging materials

Some businesses dealt with this by raising their prices $3-5 per book. Some use cheap mailers. Some don't pay their workers enough. It's a quandary.

But the single biggest reason you now see some shops asking for $5.99?

Media Mail has *tripled* in price since 2000.

That's because the C-suite doesn't want to place separate value on books anymore. They're bringing Media Mail in line with all other shipping rates, all of which have also gone up.

If you order books through major sites like Biblio, you'll have seen shipping charges creeping up over the years.

Why was it $3.99 to begin with?

- $2.50 average price for Media Mail
- $1.00 labor costs to package
- $0.49 for packing materials

All of those have gone up, obviously.

I'll tell you, speaking as someone who has packed books for shipment domestically and internationally for over 20 years, that our average postage spending in 2005-2008 was more like $4k.

I don't blame postal workers - they work *incredibly* hard - but I do blame the privatization pushers.

You've probably noticed that we don't offer free shipping.

We are always happy to adjust the amount - it's set up for books weighing 2lbs, so sometimes it overshoots - but we do charge.

Why?

Because it was a slow year for online orders...

And our postage account still ate $10,000 in 2025.

But he's the boss! 😸