Tag Archives: bookstores

Did you Know?

Electronic Frontier Foundation Asks Court on Behalf of Libraries and Booksellers to Recognize Readers’ Right to Be Free of NSA’s Online Surveillance 

It should be no surprise that libraries and bookstores—the places where you can go pick up a copy of 1984 or Darkness at Noon—are privacy hipsters. They’ve been fighting overbroad government surveillance since before it was cool.

Source: EFF Asks Court on Behalf of Libraries and Booksellers to Recognize Readers’ Right to Be Free of NSA’s Online Surveillance | Electronic Frontier Foundation

Did you Know?, General

“Why would you want to read that; it’s dumb,”

Carla Cohen, owner of the Politics & Prose Bookstore in Washington DC – one of my favorite bookstores in the country – recently passed on.  Before moving on…she had the following interaction with one of her customers (this anecdote is from a tribute shared on the Politics & Prose website):

Cohen sometimes responded to customers in a less-then-politic way: “Why would you want to read that; it’s dumb,” she would say to a customer asking for a book of which she disapproved. “You would enjoy this a lot more — and it’s a far better book.”

Now that is a bookseller, par excellence: she knew her stuff (books) and her customers.

Farewell Carla, I appreciate all that you have taught me (Adam) from afar.