In the past many (well one) reader has asked about the Riddled Bookstore. Whilst memories of it still bring me awake, screaming I will attempt to outline this glorious chapter in the fecking book of some bollocks thing.
It began, as these things usually do, with a supernatural tree appearing in the Riddled Outdoor Dining and Kabuki Area, with a mysterious message entwined in it's branches.
"Start a bookshop!" it said "Don't make me manifest myself again!" Smut tried to enquire of the tree if it was a Ghastly visitor from the eldritch dimensions and it threw branches at him so we thought we should do what it said.
Staffing was a problem as we did not want to overload the already busy Riddled staff. We interviewed a chimpanzee and an Apricot Macaque, but the combination of apes and books just did not feel right. It may be a sight best Unseen, he said knowingly.
Also the fit-out of the bookshop did not go well. We purchased the floor from an online kitchen design emporium and, well, it did not download quite as we expected. Several of the staff complained of nausea just walking on it but this may have been due to the opening of the 2011 Naujolais, a wine described by Smut as "unsettling".
But see Evangeline van Holsterin's idiot boyfriend and his cretin friends trying to pack rectangles into barrels. Square pegs, those guys!
Unsurprisingly, the library pixies were not very helpful. Here they are playing "Elephant, Elephant Whose Got Your Trunk" or some other game involving being naked and blindfolded. Or maybe it's a normal tea break for them. Note the lawyer in close attendance.
But it's a funny old game, the book game and we are expecting great things from the Riddled Staff book of photo essays entitled "How Does This Fecking Camera Work?", Hooder and Stovedin 2012, 668 pages, many with words on them.
13 comments:
Perhaps you should have paged a page to come and try that swirling toxic punch you're calling wine, before hoisting it to the venerable lips of our Smut!
Ah, it's a struggle enough to get anything out of the bottle after Smut has "sampled" it, Rachel
I want to buy some "Who Moved My Cheese".
It's been moved, sorry.
We interviewed a chimpanzee and an Apricot Macaque, but the combination of apes and books just did not feel right.
Shoulda oughta have given those simians some typewriters!
Do you have any "I Am the Cheese"?
The cat's eaten it.
"Swiss Family Robinson"?
Not much call for that book in these parts.
Shoulda oughta have given those simians some typewriters!
I refer you to a scholarly publication, "Primate sequential symbolization. 1: Encoding", by Kirkland and Archer, which goes into some detail about how to gorilla-proof an electronic keyboard before presented it to a simian to see whether any sonnets will be typed.
It emerges that a sufficiently motivated primate will squeeze bananas through the ventilation slots of an Apple computer.
I assure you that The Worm-Runner's Digest is a perfectly reputable journal.
That tree may have gone on to terrorize others into bookselling.
My (maternal) grandparents met in a bookstore.
I mean before they were parents or lovers, et al....
Inquiry reveals that there is already a genre of mash-up stories between "Black Books" and "Good Omens", involving the bookshop proprietors of both.
So far there are no mash-ups along the lines of "Fuligin Books", involving the comic misadventures of a cloaked, masked secondhand bookshop owner called Severian.
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