Afterwords Bookstore, Duckworth Street
I’ve been going here since I was a teenager. My Nan would always give my sister and I part of her "spoose’s allowance," as she called it – that does sound better than "spouse’s allowance," her portion of my grandfather’s pension – and I’d try to save mine for a trip to bookstore. Afterwords was the first secondhand bookstore I ever visited. The addiction took. Most of my library is second-hand paperbacks with loose pages and cracked spines. I wasn’t thinking royalties then. I just had to devour books. Before I had children, I’d buy books before food.
So any visit now to Afterwords is very like visiting a favourite relative. The house hasn’t changed much. New curtains, maybe, but it’s still the same house with stacks of treasure begging time.
I’ve got a weakness for earrings, too. Guess what else you can get at Afterwords?
But these were special earrings. I bogged earlier about re-structuring my novel ms Dead Reckoning. The outline is done, and in my head I’m winding the narratives lines around a belaying pin, just as on a square-rigged ship you’d "make up the lines," or wind the ropes in a sort of figure-eight (hug, hug, kiss) round the pins.
The earrings are figure-eights with a straight line dangling down the middle. My husband has since bought them for me. Omens for my ears.
4 comments:
It was my first bookstore, too, way back when it was on Water St.
I remember rifling through a box of old horror paperbacks that were on special for a quarter-- I'd hit the jackpot.
Bliss. Books for pocket change.
My favourite bookstore, too, through all its phases/addresses since Water Street East when it was located very near a fish and chip shop across from Javelin House (1979...ish?). It still IS my favourite even though I don't live in Newfoundland anymore. What was and is the appeal? Variety and organization and - most important - great people working there.
I worked for Mrs McCausland at the bookstore but I enjoyed it much longer as a patron since the 70's The Furlong boys AKA Jim Furlong from NTV was one of the owners in his hippy days. The store had a dirt floor and they wore their hair down their back and rope sandals on their feet smokign something sumthing. Now the place is clean, well organized and was run with an iron fist in a velvet glove. Catherine, her daughter now runs it with her writer husband David Benson. I miss it but I imagine eBay and Craigslist has lessened the amount of books brought in.
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