Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

26 Feb 2014, 22:03 p.m.

Cat, Dog, and Badger Each Own A Bookstore. They Are Friends.

Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2014 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.

In San Francisco last month, I found out about the bookstore trio of Dog Eared Books, Alley Cat Books, and Badger Books. Immediately I wished for a children's book about the weekly chats of a cat, a dog, and a badger who run companionate bookshops.

So I got illustrations from artists at a Double Union zine workshop, and some materiel and free photocopies from Foolscap to make a zine. This directory holds the 2.7 megabyte scan of the whole page that you could print out and cut and fold into an 8-page booklet, and lower-resolution close-ups of the individual sections, which I display below.

Cat, Dog, and Badger each own a bookstore.
They are friends.

Cat organises large book orders. They club together to get volume discounts.
"If we get a hundred copies of Hyperbole and a Half, the wholesale cost goes down."

Dog sorts out book clubs, special orders, and referrals.
"Sarah Vowell is actually speaking at Badger's on the 19th..."

Badger warns them of bad books. Badger wants to like the books. But...
"REAMDE comes out next week!"
LATER...
"I wanted Anathem II, not Michael Crichton."

Every Saturday, they have tea together, and reconcile finances.

by Sumana Harihareswara with Sailor Hg, Rose!, Sarah Peters, & Lizzard Amazon
27 Jan 2014, Double Union, San Francisco
&
2 Feb 2014, Foolscap, Seattle


Foolscap auctioned the original of my zine, gathering about twenty dollars for charity.


I am playing with a followup about a bookstore-owning hedgehog, in honor of my local.

Comments

Brendan
28 Feb 2014, 1:52 a.m.

THIS IS THE BEST THING.