Ruination & Despair

And here they are:

• Four Seasons Books in Shepherdstown, West Virginia;
• Left Bank Books in St. Louis, Missouri;
• Meadowbrook Pharmacy in Charlottesville, Virginia;
• Ohori’s Coffees in Santa Fe, New Mexico;
• Papers in Albuquerque, New Mexico; and
• The Winchester Book Gallery in Winchester, Virginia.

And that’s not counting the re-orders from our existing customers!

This time it’s Bookworks in Albuquerque. Apparently they found out about us when a helpful customer suggested they should carry our cards. Word-of-mouth is a fine thing. Thanks, whoever you were!

Bookstores are among our best customers, perhaps unsurprisingly, so we’re always delighted to welcome more of them to the ranks of fine merchants carrying our cards. In point of fact, we’ve got several such orders going out in the next few days, but today we got a big one underway to Collected Works Bookstore and Coffehouse in downtown Santa Fe. They asked for a nice selection, so there will be lots of stuff to choose from!

All the way to Australia! We shipped a first order of cards to Paperpoint in South Melbourne yesterday. So, if you happen to live down there, among the marsupials and monotremes and things, you’ve got six to ten business days to prepare yourself.

I apologize for the long pause in blogging, for which there is no excuse. There has been a fair amount of activity to report. Indeed, five more stores are now carrying Archelaus cards:

• The Whole Package in Santa Fe, New Mexico;
• Valdes, also in Santa Fe;
• Taylor Books in Charleston, West Virginia;.
• Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Massachusetts;
• Big Blue Marble Bookstore in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

And there are more to come! We have orders going out to three new customers in the next week alone.

The latest retail outlet to demand our fine cards is an art supply store, namely Art Things, Inc. (“family owned and operated since 1966″) in West Annapolis, Maryland. The order went out today, so with any luck the cards should be on their shelves by Tuesday.

We’ve added another store in Albuquerque to our roster, namely The Fat Finch, a boutique for birders. Admittedly, only a few of our cards feature birds, but evidently the others were just too appealing to be resisted! Anyway, we shipped out an unusually large and varied assortment this morning, so the cards should be in the store soon!

This time our target is the Noon Whistle Pottery in Stanardsville, Virginia, whither we sent a first order of fine cards just this morning. A few miles north of Charlottesville, Stanardsville boasts a population of approximately 500. The Pottery is located in a former gas station, and its proprietors raise chickens, bees, and mushrooms when not up to their elbows in clay!

1934: “You can tell your banker friends to go to hell.”

  —  Marriner S. Eccles to Elbert G. Bennett upon being told that Wall Street would relent in its opposition to his appointment as chairman of the Federal Reserve if he would consent to the weakening of a New Deal banking bill; quoted in Sidney Hyman, Marriner S. Eccles, Private Entrepreneur and Public Servant (Stanford, 1976), 175. Eccles went on to be confirmed despite the bankers’ opposition. The headquarters building of the Federal Reserve in Washington, D.C., is named after him.

2011: “Wall Street is our Main Street — love ’em or hate ’em. They are important and we have to make sure we are doing everything we can to support them unless they are doing something indefensible.”

  —  Kathryn S. Wylde, member of the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, reproving New York State Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman, for his unwelcome investigation of the mortgage securitization scandal; quoted in the New York Times, 22 August 2011. It is difficult to avoid the inference that Wylde regards blatant, widespread fraud by the banking industry as defensible.

This morning we shipped fine cards to two new customers in Chicago: 57th Street Books in Hyde Park (our founder’s old collegiate stomping grounds) and Eclecticity in Lincoln Square. Needless to say, we’re pretty excited — especially our crack sales-team, which is now brimming with heightened self-importance and therefore behaving quite insufferably (but you know what they’re like).

I am pleased to announce that this morning we shipped an order of fine cards to Willow on State, an avant-garde gallery in historic Kennett Square, the self-proclaimed Mushroom Capital of the World, in Chester County, Pennsylvania. This was yet another recent order that came in over the transom, without the slightest exertion by our crack sales-team, who had better start hitting the streets instead of luxuriating languidly in the air-conditioned comfort of our plush corporate headquarters.

Another brand new wholesale order has come in over the transom, this time from Mongrel, a well-regarded card and gift shop in Richmond. The order, which we shipped out this afternoon, was unusually extensive, so the lucky inhabitants of central Virginia will now have a wide selection of our fine cards to choose from (assuming they go in for that sort of thing).

Our crack sales-team, having played no discernable role in this noteworthy coup beyond sending out a catalog when one was requested, should take note that I am now actively pricing department-store mannequins, which increasingly appear to represent an attractive alternative to superfluous live employees.