5-July-99 Hiding from the Heat
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Yesterday and today were just too hot. We hid in our one air-conditioned room much of the time, but emerged in the afternoon to go to the Mobile Book Fair. The New England Mobile Book Fair, also known to some Newton people as Strymish's, is an immense, chaotic book warehouse store. It's a full-service bookstore, with several copies of Books In Print that you can look through and order from, but chances are good it already has what you're looking for. There are rows and rows of unfinished wooden shelves organized by subject and more rows and rows organized by publisher and author. Then there are rooms and rooms of remainders organized by subject. The remainders have little stickers with a price and "net". Anything that doesn't say "net" is discounted from the jacket price. Since everyone in Newton was out of town for the holiday weekend, there was a lot of empty space in their parking lot, which is more often packed. Arlene found a stack of books for her art room and herself -- We Flew Over the Bridge, memoirs of Faith Ringgold; Black Elephant with a Brown Ear, pictures by Bill Traylor; Sculpture Behind the Scenes, good children's introduction to looking at sculpture. We both had a good time browsing in the cool.
I put some serious effort into writing a Perl script to link my entries together, but it's not ready to use, nor even test, yet.
After supper we walked down to J.P. Licks ice cream. That's a Boston area chain (J.P. is Jamaica Plain, a neighborhood of Boston that's affordable and liveable) of homemade ice cream stores. There was a line out the door and onto the sidewalk, now that people were home from their long weekends. Do you remember in the movie of Mary Poppins where Bert says, “It's getting a little chilly to be a sidewalk artist now. I think it's time to be a hot chestnut vendor?” It was a good night to be an ice cream store.
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