The Daily Note’s daily schedule lasted a total of two days. The end of an era. For what it’s worth, yesterday was spent packing and driving from Saint Paul to Sussex. You didn’t miss much.

We’re in town for a little over a week for the holidays and spent our first day in paradise at the area Barnes & Noble. Chaos as usual, although I salute B&N’s decision to start including written staff recommendations to go with their inventory. My personal favorite was Mark’s ringing recommendation of To Kill a Mockingbird: “Atticus Finch is Him”. Indeed.

It’s instructive to occasionally step into the mainstream of bookselling to get a sense of the intersection between the art and its public. The history section has taken a hit since I last stopped in, although US history and military history retain their dominance in that neck of the woods. Manga, YA, and fantasy have seen their stock rise, while fiction remains a mishmash between recent Nobel winners, the latest paperbacks, and what appears to be an emphasis on reprints of “classics” in the most overwrought hardback designs you can imagine. Besides dictionaries, exercise books, and short story collections, there is merely a shelf of foreign language works in the entire shop. There used to be a well-organized space with stationary items, but that’s been subsumed by a wave of Moleskine products mixed in with the wider mix of knickknacks which haunt the edges of the book portion of the business.

The upshot? I was able to find Jon Fosse’s entire Septology I-VII in paperback, printed fresh off the strength of his recent Nobel win. Not bad for a Saturday out and about.