Still hammering out the finer policy points in our populist bid to be Mayor of Summertime, but we’ve narrowed our main campaign promises down to these two: “Tomatoes for Everyone! Kites for Everyone!”

The Paper Hound: willfully misconstruing the intention of customers requesting a “great beach read” since 2013.

Introducing some new arrivals to our collection of tiny and incendiary books. Local historians, build a compact matchbook library of places where you could smoke in Greater Vancouver, circa 1950-1990. Airports! Nightclubs! Strip joints! Brake and muffler shops! Department stores! The world was your ashtray, and the Eddy Light Co. was your billboard. Please remember that The Paper Hound is a non-smoking environment and strike match well away from the other books.

Please indicate your cat affinity score by ranking this list of books, where 

a) The Big Book of Cats = Strongly in favour

b) How to Live with a Calculating Cat = Neutral

c) Cat-hater’s Handbook or the Ailurophobe’s Delight = Strongly opposed

and

d) How to Raise a Dog in the City and the Suburbs = N/A, I’m a dog person

(And since we’re obtaining extremely unscientific results from limited data, let’s note that both Tomi Ungerer and James Thurber lean pro-dog in this sample; and that every person who has picked up The Cat-Hater’s Handbook since it went on display earlier this week has remarked to their spouse: “We should get this for your mother”, from which we can extrapolate that maternity and aptitude for comic illustration are strong counter-indicators for cat affinity).

Flesh, Metal & Glass: a 1970 self-published treatise on driver safety augmented with grotesque Weegee-esque photographs of fatal collision scenes and wry commentary (sample captions: “There is disbelief in this man’s face as he tenderly cradles the head of his dying brother”; “The driver and seven children never made it to church this Sunday morning”, and “This is a pole that did not give”), which we’ve been marketing as an indispensable auxiliary text to any serious J.G. Ballard collection. A regular customer yesterday pronounced this book to be “peak Paper Hound”, which we accept as both a compliment and a challenge. 

Incidentally, it’s a long weekend, and we’re kind of playing it by ear, but we will definitely be open between noon and 6pm on Easter Sunday and Monday, and regular hours Good Friday and Saturday. Hop on in, biblio-bunnies.

Imagine a world of interior design where paint schemes were based on Penguin’s proprietary colour palettes. While the classic Penguin “Pumpkiniest Pumpkin” orange gets a lot of play around here, and makes for an arresting monochrome paperback stack, if you were going to, say, redecorate your bathroom, you’d probably want to go with their Modern Classic line’s washed-out green-gray (let’s call it “Mid-Atlantic Stupor”) and reserve the orange for “flair” (so well-executed above in the Hemingway and Joyce). Pantone, call me!

Introducing the first ever Paper Hound Short Story Writing Contest. There is no prize aside from the inherent satisfaction of creating a coherent narrative thread out of a series of discrete impressions. The basic plot points (“What We Know”) are listed below. Writers, please address the articulating issues of motivation and consequence (“What We Don’t Know”).

1. An 1897 Collins Illustrated Pronouncing Dictionary is gifted to J. Benson Pascoe by his father, J.B. Pascoe, on 13 July, 1899. That same day, one J.B. Pascoe (Junior or Senior not specified, but tentative printing suggests Jr.) inscribed his name and the date at the top of page 289 (Udder thru Unbridled, facing page Turkey thru Ubiquity).

2. Pascoe Jr. eventually became Assistant Superintendant of something-or-other.

3. Somewhere along the way, the dictionary acquired a handmade (but machine-sewn) jacket.

4. The jacket created a pocket-like sleeve. Inside the sleeve are tucked:

     a) a jaunty red feather

and

     b) a well-thumbed 19th century pamphlet on Vaginal Irrigation Syringes

Good luck to all entrants!

Remember, this is the key to our bibliophilic enthusiasm: a physical book transmits a story in its text, but also in its object. Let’s enumerate the stories contained in this little volume.

1. It’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, probably the most culturally influential children’s book written in English. It has a story whose keywords you are undoubtedly familiar with, even if you haven’t read the book: down the rabbit hole, drink me, the Mad Hatter, the Cheshire Cat, off with her head, etc.

2. In February of 1930, this copy was gifted by a “P. O’R” with the winking inscription “From The Queen to The Duchess”.

3. Some time later, a junior librarian attempted to put the book into circulation, gluing in a handmade card pocket and an entreaty on the first page of the text to “PLEASE WASH HANDS BEFORE READ” (sic).

4. However, the book appears to have been an unpopular title in this nursery lending library, as not a single borrower’s name is inscribed on the card. The non-circulating book provided an ideal habitat for a voracious book worm, who took advantage of its bookshelf torpor to bore fascinating rivulet-like pathways along the edges of the text block. At the proper angles, they look like aerial photos of terraced rice paddies, or papier mâché topographical maps. 

5. In 1966, Bev Chu received a friendly Christmas card from noted Hawaiian professional wrestler Sammy Steamboat Mokuahi (1934-2006) and his wife Sheryll. She tucked it into the copy of Alice, as one does with slim paper documents of unclassified sentimental value.

6. It arrives in a ziploc bag at The Paper Hound, where in our evangelizing for the objectification of the printed and bound, we lay bare all of its elements of extra-textual intrigue. As if that weren’t crass enough, we do it here, on the Internet, the rabbit hole of our era (see no.1).