Dangerous Bookstores Or Vonnegut Might Look Good In Lace

When I’m not working on the fifty-billion or so projects with looming deadlines and post-it-notes with ‘DO THIS NOW’ on them, I think of new ideas for the Perth skeptics group. One thing that has been ticking over for a while is a book-club. Mostly because there’s a rather dangerous bookstore near the meet-up place.

Dangerous bookstores can be defined in several ways and I don’t think that they’re the same for every person. However, one distinguishing feature of a ‘dangerous bookstore’ is that you don’t leave without leaving money behind. This particular one near the meet-up place is memorable because of a black and red garter belt. It cost me about $100 in books.

People in marketing can be daft. They think little gimmicks like putting a garter belt on a romance novel will guarantee it’ll be more appealing. The last time I saw a book display with a bunch of garter belts around the mid-drift of a stack of blushing paperbacks (one of those pulp fiction sorts) was in February, around Valentine’s day. Most of those sorts of books are purchased sans leg-decoration – a little crumpled pile of them get left on the book bin shelf. People remove them to allow for better browsing, rather than carry around a nasty bit of frilly elastic that wouldn’t fit the average leg anyway.

This particular garter belt that I found in the bookstore didn’t seem to have a book to cover though. As I scanned the nearby shelves (‘New Release – Non-Fiction‘) I couldn’t find a single book that had a matching frilly decoration. There wasn’t anything that appeared to require it (no new biography on Christine Keeler, nothing with Fabio on the fluro covers) and I wondered if perhaps the one book that came with it had been purchased, leaving this orphaned lingerie item behind.

Because I had about forty minutes to kill before the author of the book-signing arrived, I decided to see if perhaps the belt belonged to a book in another section and that it perhaps got mislaid somehow next to Hawking’s ‘God Created the Integers‘ or Dawkin’s ‘The Greatest Show on Earth‘.

It certainly didn’t seem to be designed for those two books either, although from what I recall of Dawkin’s banter with Douglas Adams, I think perhaps he would have found a certain amount of charm in having a frilly around his mid-drift. Maybe his time-lord missus could wear it as a memento when he’s on tour? ‘Richard, there’s a bunch of books delivered for signing and a new batch of garters in “iconoclast black”. Did you want some in ‘re-evolutionary green’ for the trade paperback edition?’

It didn’t seem to suit the new hardcover Peter Cook memoirs or the ‘Letters from a Portuguese Nun‘ (its cover was too… austere… although I was tempted to try) or even ‘Seven Million Years – The Story of Human Evolution ‘ by Douglas Palmer. Their loss, perhaps.

Anyway, I started checking out if it fitted with anything in the ‘Theatre’ section and had no luck. Although I did find that Stoppard has ‘Pirandello’s Henry IV‘ in print and I’ve been meaning to see ‘Six Characters in Search of an Author‘, so perhaps this was a good time to read his interpretation. Apparently his ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll’ was inspired in some part by the Czech-set classic ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being‘ (or at least in the name of the main character Tomas) but I don’t think that it was designed with a stocking elastic decoration in mind. About then I discovered the ‘cult book’ section.

This is where they keep Dunn’s ‘Geek Love‘ and all the Palahniuk novels. I found ‘The Curse of Lono‘ by Hunter S. Thompson (illustrated by Ralph Steadman, naturally) and thought then that I found the most suitable new home for the garter. But ‘Curse…’ was a big fat glossy hardcover and any garter binding on that would only suit those who the thigh girth of an out-of-work actress posing as a incestuous-lesbian-ice-addicted-regular on a Jerry Springer show.

Nor did it suit Neal Stephenson’s joint novel with Frederick George in ‘Cobweb‘ (I’d only read ‘Interface‘ before) and although tucking it around the ‘Daedalus Book of Finnish Fantasy‘ (a quick scan of the contents alerted me to words like ‘bogs‘, farmers‘, ‘trousers‘ and ‘the train station Zubotica‘ so I don’t quite know quite if the standard of fantasy in Finland really needs additional frills with that sort of excitement between its pages) was really really alluring, I eventually decided that the likes of the ‘Call of Cthulhu’ and ‘Slaughterhouse 5‘ would be better off unmolested by black elastic and red satin. My sincere apologies to the estates of Lovecraft and Vonnegut.

About now I was juggling a few books as I went around, but I still hadn’t got to the graphic novel section. In that section there a lady wearing a really snappy black corset. She was checking out the Dave Sims and I suggested that she look at the Grant Morrison’s or the early work of Alan Moore (‘D.R and Quinch‘ and ‘The Ballad of Halo Jones‘). She suggested that perhaps the garter could go quite nicely around the film-tie in of Watchmen, in quasi-homage to Sally Jupiter (despite not being yellow and black) – but it was still too small a fit.

Then I realised that there were six books alone on Mozart. And that the Pet Shop Boys had a big illustrated volume on all of their album artwork in a shiny foil book, which revealed that they once wanted to do a musical based on Graham Greene’s ‘Brighton Rock‘. And that someone left a big coffee cup stain on a pile of Robert Jordans.

Then I realised that I was never going to find a damned owner for this bloody garter belt unless I stopped browsing and started looking in some overly-sensible sections of the bookstore that really required some cheap titillating action to get a book sold. Which book really deserved to have a sprightly garter belt to get it some attention? I mean, the latest edition of ‘The Princess Bride‘ looks bloody awful. Like a five year old decided to scribble what they thought a pirate would look like if they were holding a cattle-prod. And no one was buying anything from the pile of ‘History’s Greatest Scandals – Shocking Stories of Powerful People‘, much to author Ed Wright’s dismay, I’m certain. Boring cover that made it look like a daily planner. No one was looking at Shermer’s ‘The Mind of the Market‘. Would it be wrong to write to Skeptic.com and suggest that you get a pair of frillies with every new edition of ‘Why People Believe Weird Things‘?

‘‘Butterflies of the World’ had a great cover, but no one was going to notice it behind the puppy training books. How many people remember Abbott’s classic ‘Flatland‘? You could do your own inspired experiments in 3-D space with a garter-belt if you pinged it about the bedroom. Not that I think A. Square would have really enjoyed a two-dimensional experience of a pole-dance. Even graphic-novel reading corset wearers would find it difficult to get some attention if they were reduced to a octagon.

I was deciding between putting it on Patrick Suskind’s ‘Perfume‘ or Lemony Snicket’s ‘The End’ (which is actually quite an amusing, esoteric in-joke but this blog-post has gone on far too long enough) when the author for the book-signing turned up and people started handing out tiny little bottles of champagne to celebrate that this was the first bookstore signing since last night’s ‘official’ launch.

By this point I had about six or seven books to buy and I just wrapped the garter-belt around my copy of Apuleius’ ‘Eros and Psyche‘ (Penguin Epics released a bunch of little Classics readers, not unlike their Penguin 60s series back in ’95 where they sold itty-bitty books with itty-bitty prices featuring selected chapters or short stories) and so I got that and ‘The Epic of Gilgamesh‘, ‘Adventures of Alexander the Great‘ and Herodotus’ ‘Xerxes Invades Greece‘ – and asked if they minded if I kept the garter.

The guy shrugged and took my money.

So now I have too many books and a garter belt.

I think I’ll use it as a hair decoration and wear it when I go to the Skeptics conference in Brisbane. So you’ll be the only people who know that I’m actually wearing a frilly, tarty leg-circulation inhibitor in my curls when I’m running around interviewing people.

Tagged as: All About Me, blogging, books, bookstore, Brisbane conference, Perth Skeptics