1. Essays & Reflections: “Running a Bookshop in Lockdown” by Ann Patchett
You may only know Ann Patchett as a novelist, but she’s also co-owner of Parnassus Books in Nashville, TN. In this short piece, she ponders the shift in their business model after the coronavirus closed the front doors: from in-store browsing to curbside delivery to mail order. According to Patchett,
in the absence of customers coming to browse, the backroom folks have moved to the capacious store front, setting up folding tables far away from each other to make our private spaces. We crank up the music. We pull books off the shelves. The floor is a sea of cardboard boxes – orders completed, orders still waiting on one more book. We make no attempt to straighten anything up before leaving at night. We have neither the impetus nor the energy. There are bigger fish to fry. Orders are coming in as fast as we can fill them.
Like most businesses today, bookstores are also adapting. In Patchett’s words, “We make our plans. We change our plans. We make other plans. This is the new world.”
2. Essays & Reflections: “The Return of the Eighth Day Books Catalog & an Introduction to Eighth Day Institute” by Erin Doom
Like Parnassus Books, mail order has been key to the on-going business of Eighth Day Books. And many of the orders are coming in by snail mail. People are really tearing out a physical mail-order form from the new Eighth Day Books catalog (#23) and sending it in via the U.S. Postal Service. As they have now for over three decades and counting. Here’s how I put it in the introduction to the new catalog:
That’s right, I said mail orders. Imagine the slow process. Back then people took the time to slowly and thoughtfully read through the entire catalog, marking the books they were interested in. There was no surfing, scrolling, or clicking; in those days these words had a completely different connotation. Then, after the torturous process of narrowing down the list of marked books, folks actually filled out a mail-order form. Yep. They wrote down each title and price, manually added up the total, inserted the form into an envelope, stamped it, mailed it, and then, most inconceivable of all, they patiently waited for the books.
More:
But the wait was worth it. Because you knew that every single title in that catalog had been carefully chosen, that each book had not only been held in a person’s hands who loved books, but had been carefully read, recommended, and reviewed. Moreover, the principle upon which the selection of books was based, as articulated in each catalog’s introduction, was so winsome that you had no doubt that any book coming from Eighth Day Books was going to be a prized treasure.
Read the whole introduction here. And if you don’t have a copy of the catalog, be sure to get one today by calling the bookstore at 800.841.2541. You couldn’t ask for a better reading guide during a pandemic.
3. Essays & Reflections: “Reading in the Time of Coronavirus” by Brian Volck
The next best thing to the Eighth Day Books catalog is this piece by our friend (and pediatrician) Brian Volck. While the scope of the Eighth Day Books catalog is wide (at least within the narrow niche of our focus on classics in religion, philosophy, history & literature), Volck’s list is narrowly focused on books for times of plague and pestilence, specifically books on the Bubonic Plague, the White Plague (tuberculosis), cholera, and nonfiction sources on the significance of pandemics. His consoling conclusion:
as you contend with the daily disruptions and—I hope—less frequent existential crises of the ongoing pandemic, it helps to remember that humanity has weathered the like before and will do so again. So while medical scientists scramble to demystify this novel coronavirus, those compelled to sit and wait might find time to learn how our ancestors lived in a world of chastening limits—a world still very much with us.
4. (More) Books: The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age
by Sven Birkerts
Today’s Eighth Day Books review comes from literary critic and essayist Sven Birkerts. I fondly remember reading this book back in the early 90s. Dipping back into it today, it’s just as good as I remember it and more timely than ever. This sentence alone should make the linked blurb superfluous: “As the world hurtles on toward its mysterious rendezvous, the old act of slowly reading a serious book becomes an elegiac exercise.” If that's not sufficiently convincing,
go ahead and read the review here
and order the book from
Eighth Day Books.
5. Poetry: “And Yet the Books” by Czeslaw Milosz
And yet the books will be there on the shelves, separate beings,
That appeared once, still wet
As shining chestnuts under a tree in autumn,
And, touched, coddled, began to live
In spite of fires on the horizon, castles blown up,
Tribes on the march, planets in motion.
“We are,” they said, even as their pages
Were being torn out, or a buzzing flame
Licked away their letters. So much more durable
Than we are, whose fail warmth
Cools down with memory, disperses, perishes.
I imagine the earth when I am no more:
Nothing happens, no loss, it’s still a strange pageant,
Women’s dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley.
Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born,
Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights.
6. Bible:
Matt. 24:36-51; 25:1-46; 26:1-2 and Matt. 22:15-46; 23:1-39.
Online here.
7. Liturgy: Feast day of Sts. Aristarchus, Pudens, and Trophimus, Holy Apostles of the 70 by St. Nikolai Velimirović
Aristarchus was Bishop of Apamea in Syria. The Apostle Paul mentions him several times (Acts 19:29, Col. 4:10, Phil. v. 24). He was arrested in Ephesus, together with Gaius, by a multitude of people who had risen up against Paul. The Apostle Paul writes to the Colossians: “Aristarhus my fellow prisoner saluteth you” (Col. 4:10). In the Epistle to Philemon, Paul calls Aristarchus “my fellow laborer,” together with Mark, Demas, and Luke.
Pudens was a distinguished citizen of Rome. The Apostle Paul mentions him once (2 Tim. 4:21). At first, the home of Pudens was a haven for the chief apostles and later it was converted into a place of worship, called the Shepherd’s Church.
Trophimus was from Asia (Acts 20:4), and he accompanied the Apostle on his travels. In one place the Apostle Paul writes: “Trophimus have I left at Miletum sick (2 Tim. 4:20).
During Nero’s persecution, when the Apostle Paul was beheaded, all three of these glorious apostles were also beheaded.
8. Word from the Fathers: On reading by St Joseph the Hesychast
Recently canonized, St Joseph (d. Aug 15, 1959) offers you a number of Athonite sayings that explain why Christians must be readers.
Read them here.
**All books (and icons) in print available from Eighth Day Books.
Please support an independent bookstore that believes in the eighth day resurrection of our God and Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Give them a call at 1.800.841.2541 or
visit their website here. And don’t forget
Eighth Day Members
(Patrons+) receive 10% discount, plus many other perks!
