Sunny Vancouver

Which words, at this time of year, are normally uttered in irony. But it is sunny in Vancouver today, probably because the Weather Gods noticed that I had left my sunglasses on my desk in London.

Slickety Jim’s is, indeed, in a decidedly dilapidated state; that is to say, it consists of a pile of charred timber surrounded by a fence. But on the opposite corner of Main & Broadway, Pulp Fiction Books has a first edition of Hunter Thompson’s The Curse of Lono. I was forced to vacate the premises; that smell of burning plastic was, in fact, my credit card, and a fire in a bookstore is never a good thing. (On reading about the fire that destroyed Slickety Jim’s a few weeks back, my first thought was actually something like, “Broadway & Main! But that’s Pulp Fiction!”)

I did snag McGuane’s Nothing But Blue Skies and Richard Ford’s Women With Men on my way out. Neither of those is really collectible, but I have that completist urge with a few writers, and those are two of them.