THE BOOKMAN REPORTS ON INTERESTING RETAIL EXPERIENCES

Rubiner's Cheesemongers & Grocers
264 Main Street, Great Barrington, MA

These guys specialise in hand-crafted cheeses, cured meats and artisan groceries. Matthew Rubiner was impressively knowledgeable and most helpful. We tasted a variety of cheeses and staggered away with a great haul including a large chunk of Stilton, some mature cheddar and a whole fat round of soft cheese. Fabulous place, a must visit if you are anywhere nearby.
http://www.merchantcircle.com/blogs/Rubiners.Cheesemongers.And.Grocers.413-528-0488

Strongtree Organic Coffee Roasters
60 South Front Street, Hudson, NY.

Great cafe across the road from the Hudson railway station where twice we enjoyed double shot lattes while we waited for the train to arrive. And interestingly a young kiwi lass by the name of Jo works here............

Hudson City Books
553 Warren Street, Hudson, NY

Long, narrow bookstore that deals in used and rare books, about 15,000 titles in stock. Fossicking around in the literary criticism and literary biography section down the back of the store I found a first edition of the US edition of The Letters of Katherine Mansfield edited by J.Middleton Murry. Two hardback volumes in slipcase published by Alfred Knopf in 1929.
I felt almost guilty paying only $20 for the set. It is over 40 years since I first read the KM letters and thus I spent a happy evening by the fire (eight below outside) reading some of them again. What delightful language, easy to understand why she is still so widely read and studied around the world 86 years after her death at the age of 34.

Here is the publishers blurb from the outside of the slipcase, written remember by an American editor 80 years ago:

These letters reveal to an unforgetting public the Katherine Mansfiled known to her friends during the last ten years of her life. They share with everything else she wrote a beauty and freshness of expression and spirit about which there is no need to remark. One realises anew in reading them how great was their writer's joy in "things" for their own sake, and how sensitive her perceptions. The allusions to her work, fewer than in the Journal, are as valuable in leading one to her estimation of herself. Together with the Journal, these letters form as complete and intimate an autobiography of a genius as the world has had.

THE SPOTTY DOG - BOOKS AND ALE
440 Warren Street, Hudson, NY

What a great idea, a bar (selling beer and wine) within a bookstore. I had two half pints of an unfiltered wheat beer (delicious) and bought the following three books (how am I going to get all these books back to NZ?):

Word Fugitives - in pursuit of wanted words Barbara Wallraff Collins - Hardback $14.95
Great fun, mind and vocabulary expanding.

Entre Nous A Woman's Guide to Finding Her Inner French Girl Debra Ollivier St.Martin's Griffin - $12.95
This one for Annie.

A Day in New York
Photography by Andre Fichte
Ear Books - $5 (in the sale section)
New York, one of the world's great great cities, and in this colourful and appealing photographic hardcover book Fitche documents a day in its life.

A wonderful souvenir at a bargain price especially since I have seen it on sale at full price in NY city bookstores at $44.95 and in NZ at NZ$75.




COSTCO WHOLESALE AND IKEA
Brooklyn.

Visited these two enormous buisnesses this morning with my daughter. These places represent big shed shopping on a scale we do not see in New Zealand. Imagine if you will the largest Bunnings store in New Zealand, double that in size and then make it two storied and you will have some idea of the size of the Brooklyn branch of Costco. The shopping trolleys are twice the size of a NZ supermarket trolley and they need to be as everying is sold in bulk.
Then Ikea, as large as a medium size mall. I remember going to one in Melbourne once, well you could fit the Melbourne store into one corner of the Brooklyn store.