May flowers always line your path and sunshine light your day.  May songbirds serenade you every step along the way.  May a rainbow run beside you in a sky that's always blue.  And may happiness fill your heart each day your whole life through.

~ Traditional Irish Blessing



Melancthon Township, Ontario. Photo: lbwalker



On a Shoestring ~

When the publisher of a struggling American magazine* asked short-story writer, Dorothy Parker, why she had not come in to do a piece she had promised him, she retorted, "Someone else was using the pencil."

Roy Thompson, patriarch of the great Canadian dynasty, multi-billion dollar, Thompson Newspapers, was known for his "count-every-pencil" accounting.

Herb Mardindale, owner/founder of The Neat Little Bookshop, expressed concern that we could "make enough money."  Herb kept his accounting on a pile of stapled scrap paper, using stubs of pencils.  Herb knew, of course, that our goal was not to become a Canadian dynasty, or certainly not The New Yorker magazine.  Herb, we are coming up on our sixth or seventh year ~ depending on which Cayuga Street location you figure!  The Neat Little Bookshop doesn't collect tax on used books;  we don't earn enough to qualify.

Book people seem happy with modest surroundings ~ a round table where great conversations naturally and spontaneously erupt.   Pencils abound, ratty, chipped with long-ago fossilized erasers.  We will never be trail-blazers in The Neat Little Bookshop, but then no one is counting the pencils either.  

*The New Yorker