THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP
News item from a year ago this month:
“First, Amazon killed traditional bookstores. Then, the retail giant decided to open its own brick-and-mortar stores. Now, the Amazon Books initiative is dead. In a strange, meta saga, Amazon Books, the online retailer’s physical store experiment exploded like an unpunctured potato in the microwave. On March 2, the company confirmed that it’s closing all 68 of its physical bookstores and pop-ups in a major crash into the concrete from its dive into bookstore locations. Also falling under the ax is Amazon’s “4-star” experiment — a store that sells toys, household goods, and other items with high customer ratings.”
Which leads - eventually - to my point today.
I played hooky this past Saturday and went out of the house for a whole four hours, no worries of anything untoward happening - although I came back to discover we had experienced two power outages while I was out, and then got two more that afternoon after I returned, the last one lasting two hours; those four plus the two last weekend with the big rain storm make more power outages here than all the power outages here since we moved to this part of Hell Lay eight years ago.
What did I do with my morning of hooky? I drove across the Valley (not on the freeway) over to Burbank and went to the monthly meeting of the Los Angeles Miniatures Society - the local model geeks - that I hadn’t been to since 2017. Where I learned that at my age if you don’t see people for six years, you’ll have trouble recognizing them at first since We. Are. All. Getting. Fucking. Old!
But it was nice that everybody remembered me, was glad to see me again, and too many of them had gone through what I had gone through. So there we were, a bunch of kids in their 70s, doing Show And Tell about their latest creation.
You can tell a lot about a person by the way they go about building a model. My friend Ed, now retired from CalTech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where among other things over a 40 year career there, he led the team that created the control devices for the Mars rover “Opportunity,” which was only supposed to work for 90 days and ran for 14 years. The way you do that is with Attention To Detail. Ed presented a diorama of a P-47 being worked on in France after D-Day in the summer of 1944. He’d made a base on which the grass was worn to dirt from airplanes being moved around, and was starting to burn as the rains came to an end during August 1944 - exactly right in detail for the story his diorama was telling. He’d done some research and found that during the war Coco-Cola used to send “care packages” to the troops, boxes full of games - checkers, chess, cards, dice, etc. So the two guys working on the plane were taking a break, playing checkers on a board he had designed and printed out, a pair of kids (the average age of the ground crews was 19-25) having a moment away from the war and the work of war. The model had been opened up with the engine and the rest of the “guts” done on a 3D printer for the parts. Did I mention this was all in 1/48 - 1 inch on the model = 48 inches on the real thing. Lots of Attention To Detail.
The purpose of the trip was to reconnect by more than email with my screenwriting partner, Ken Goldman. Ken got his Parkinson’s diagnosis back in 2012, and put in a new bathroom in his house last summer, takes his new over-active Labrador pup for a mile walk in their hilly neighborhood twice a week, is working on his third book and still builds his “only Ken would do one of these” models despite Parkinson’s attacking his hands. I hadn’t been able to drive over to his place since Jurate got her diagnosis. I brought along a bag of the books I wrote while caring for her, for him.
After the meeting broke up, we went down to Burbank House of Hobbies, which was only 5 minutes away. I haven’t been there in six years; I’ve been a customer since it was at a different location 40 years ago when it was run by the guy Glenn bought it from 30 years ago. Local Hobby Shops are supposed to be on the Endangered Species List, but HofH has stayed open because Glenn also set up an online store with its own website and also a presence on eBay; I’ve been using that after I couldn’t take the time to drive across the Valley any more.
When I was a kid, a hobby shop was my other Special Place besides the library. Both had stacks of the things I wanted - models and books - that seemed to a ten year old to reach up to the sky, filling the space around the narrow aisles. Most hobby shops that still exist aren’t like that any more and haven’t been for a very long time, since even before the internet came along to kill off so many of them. I used to go to the library or the hobby shop and spend hours there, looking at this one or that one of the choices presented, until I found that Special One that had the “Read me!” or “Buy Me!” sign on it that only I could see. I never knew when I walked in what I was going to walk out with. It was magical. I remember a book I read back then, “The Old Curiosity Shop,” which was about places like that, where the magic waited.
So it was really wonderful to walk through the door of the Burbank House of Hobbies and realize we had stepped back in time. The shop was full to brimming with kits and all the things one needs to build a kit. The stacks were so high that when I looked up at them they seemed to reach to the ceiling, and the aisles were narrow. And we spent quite a bit of time, just looking at what was there, making mental notes of certain presences for future reference.
And then I walked around one stack, and There It Was - PAINT! (You have to understand, paint is hard to get nowadays because the gubmint while pertectin’ us from the War on Terra has determined that the Terr’ists can put liquid explosive in paint bottles and maybe possibly perhaps blow up the airplane carrying the paint, or the train carrying it. To limit the possible damage of the Terr’ble Terr’ist Attack, paint can only be transported in a truck; it can’t be sent by mail but can be sent by UPS, FedEx Ground, etc.) Not just any kind of paint, but paint for models. Yes, over the past 50 years, there have been crazy people who discovered things like the fact that Japanese airplane manufacturers during World War II used their own paint they produced to cover their products. Therefore, a Zero fighter built by Mitsubishi was a different collection of colors from a Zero built by Nakajima, even though the color names were the same. And it wasn’t just the Japanese. The same was true with U.S. airplane companies. There was a war on! Nobody was worried about whether all Olive Drab used on airplanes and vehicles was the same shade. Olive Drab was Olive Drab. But it matters to we crazy modelers, the ten year olds who grew up to Pay Attention to Detail and send rovers to Mars.
I ended up walking out with a box full of $80 dollars worth of paints I hadn’t been able to locate for years and had been reproducing by mixing and matching. Given inflation, that was about the same as the $2 bill my grandmother used to give me to go visit Anderson’s Toy Store.
It was magic. I found the things I went there to get.
Which brings me to my point in starting with that year-old news item.
There’s a reason why the Amazon Bookstores failed.
They weren’t magic. They were filled only with the books the Amazon computers recognized as “best sellers.” Amazon was selling books in their bookstore the same way they sell books on their website.
Which doesn’t work in the world of brick and mortar bookstores, or hobby shops, or Jo-ann’s stores, or any of the other Old Curiosity Shops people like to visit. When I want a specific item, I hop on the computer and I go to the website where I know I can find that item and I order it and it arrives on my front porch a few days later. That’s really great and I really love that; I am definitely not complaining about the ease of online shopping.
A Funny Thing that I am sure is connected to this: the night before my morning of playing hooky, I went up to one of the online hobby retailers, and they had the paints in stock, and I chose all the paints I bought the next day. But when I got to payment, for some reason they had a glitch in their system, and it wouldn’t “catch” my payment information, despite repeated attempts. I couldn’t buy the paint!
That’s because I wasn’t supposed to buy it there. I was supposed to discover it, and choose each one personally after thinking about it, and walk out with my prize box.
People don’t go to a bookstore to pick up the Latest And Greatest That Everyone Else Is Reading. They go to a bookstore, or a hobby shop, or a Jo-Ann’s (Jurate used to spend hours in the local Jo-Ann’s, looking for The Magic Thing That Was Hers) to find the thing they didn’t know they were going to get, the thing that most likely Everyone Else Is Not Buying, the thing that’s there for them.
I’ve written about how talking to a clerk in a Borders Bookstore led to the career I now have. You can’t do that at Amazon or any of the other places like that.
Because they don’t sell magic. You only find magic at The Old Curiosity Shop.
Nobody wants to spend an hour in traffic on Victory Boulevard driving across the Valley to a store where you’re going to buy the thing you could get in two minutes on the computer ordering it from the place where you get those things. But we will spend an hour in traffic to go have a magical experience. To find the thing that’s waiting there for us in The Old Curiosity Shop. Whatever it is.
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A million stars TC and a million more for this 'show and tell'. It is more than magical, it's the real McCoy. Thank you.
Great story, TC. Brings back memories of how we get off on the career we follow and one of the half-dozen fears I have, this one being that libraries you and I knew will go the way of hobby shops, book stores, and other niche means to get caught up in something magical. My career in research (behaviors and attitudes of gifted college students and the remainder in disability and rehabilitation research) and policy started in the open-stacks at the University of Illinois when I was working on my doctoral dissertation. As an aural learner, I didn't learn to read until my senior year in college, bought my first book when I was admitted to graduate school, and learned to read for comprehension as I was writing my proposal for dissertation research. To my amazement, there was so much more available and worth reading than listening to others who I considered smart or well educated. In my college days, one looked up a reference in a card catalogue, submitted your the to a librarian, and if it was in, checked it out for anywhere between a couple of hours and maybe 3-5 days. To my amazement, graduate students were allowed to go into the library stacks, pick out, and most important for me, read anything and everything one might find in the nearness of the Dewey Decimal System reference number of the book or journal I went to get. To my professors amazement, I came to be learned and able because I stood or sat on the floors of the libraries, thumbing through and gathering stuff somewhat related with greater depth than were I to only rely upon books and research that fit with current thought on my research. I read, thought about, and began the downward spiral that involves buying books by the yard, rather than with a keen sense of what must be read. I remain positively proud to have been confused by what I once knew when faced with related ideas and links to theory and fiction and can't stop learning now from reading and writing in this 8th decade. So, onto my fear. Universities digitalized their collections and while inter-library loan is an amazing opportunity, now, I still find myself standing (or sitting on the floor) at my local library or in the stacks at the university where I retired, thumbing and reading stuff I didn't know. Soon, I fear, the cost of having chairs and tables and having to check out and in books will go the way of the local bookstore and the Borders of my adult world. Another aural learner will miss the opportunity to thumb through and absorb seemingly unrelated writing and get somewhere they would never have expected in their head or in their career.