April 19, 2008

    As you’ll notice above, we now have two links on the website to YouTube videos shot here at the store a week or so ago.  Tony, a regular customer of ours (not “Toni”, our office manager) shot the videos with his digital camera to show a friend of his back in Chicago, a young lady named Amy, what our store looks like.  Amy, evidently, is a big used & rare book fan who, since she lives in Chicago, has never seen a store of our size and scope.  I got Tony’s permission to post the links here on the website with the promise that, when Amy comes to town, she can get a special tour of the store from one of us (including trips to our scary basements) and a piece of John’s meteorite. 

            Here are a couple things to notice about the video:  1) last summer I told about the puppies John King rescued over by Cobo Hall just before Detroit’s yearly massive fireworks display.  We all helped raise the puppies here at the store, playing with them, feeding them, etc, and they all found homes and turned out to be playful, and people-friendly dogs.  In the second video, you’ll catch a couple glimpses of one of the “puppies”, a young girl named Tawnee, who runs around in circles and does play-bows.  2)  All employees of the store declined to be photographed in the video – either we’re all shy or we’re hiding out from the tax collectors and process servers.  And, Tony said he tried to avoid other customers, too, since he was posting this online for anyone and everyone to see.  3) Amy is not Tony’s girlfriend.  He wanted to make this clear.  You’ll see a wedding ring on his finger several times in the video.  Amy was actually a friend of Tony’s wife first, I understand.  4) If you look at Tony’s YouTube page (see TH77046), you’ll see a couple of  videos of his pets, a “remarkably handsome cat” named Rudolph, and a dog named Nattie.

    HOUR DETROIT magazine has jumped on the John King Books bandwagon.  They always give us some mention in their Best of Detroit issue, but this past Thursday they actually sent a crew of photographers and technicians and beautiful models to do a fashion shoot here at the store.  As these things go, the prep time was longer than the actual shooting time, and they came and went without too much fuss and ado.  When the photos come out, we’ll let you know.

    Want to make a Hollywood movie?  Know somebody in the business?  Here’s a story for you, full of intrigue and passion and suspense.  It’s a great period piece – somebody call George Clooney! 

    Back in the 1840s, the Michigan Central Railroad had a policy that they would compensate farmers the total value of any livestock killed by their trains.  But, for some reason (monetary?) the policy was changed in 1849: from that year on, the Michigan Central would only give the farmers half the value of the livestock killed.  That was the start of “The Great Railroad Conspiracy”.  Suddenly, there was an increase in vandalism against the railroad, and violence against the railroad employees.  All this culminated in the burning of the Michigan Central roundhouse here along the shores of the Detroit River (not far from our store).  The railroad sent out detectives, and had a number of the conspirators arrested at a big rally they were holding.  The case gripped the nation at the time, and Senator William Seward of New York (later Lincoln’s Secretary of State) came in to work for the defense.  After a trial that lasted from May 28^th to September 25^th, 1851, the defendants were found guilty (ok, if you’re making a movie, you may want to take some artistic license here) and sentenced to between 5 and 10 years apiece..

            We have the printed transcript of the trial for sale here at the store (see item 97-3582, “Railroad Conspiracy Case”, $395.00), one fat volume of over 1000 pages, including testimony of witnesses and arguments of the attorneys.  It is a wonderfully dramatic book, the stuff that novels (and movies) are made of.  It ranks right up there with the Ossian Sweet trial in the 1920s, which brought to Detroit Clarence Darrow as the defense attorney, and made the reputation of the Judge, Frank Murphy, who would become Detroit’s Mayor, Michigan’s Governor,  US Attorney General, and finally a US Supreme Court justice.

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