I finished up Huntingtower this morning and then headed off for lunch at the Green Cat. The place was packed and it took awhile to get my salad. When it finally arrived I scarfed most of it down and rushed off to Bumbershoot. I headed across Seattle Center and got in line for the Sarah Vowell and Dave Eggers reading. The long line folded in on itself several times. I didn’t get in but stood in line for a bit, hoping enough people would leave early and I’d be let in. It wasn’t looking good, so I split.
There were a couple of bands I wanted to see, the shows were still a couple of hours away. I didn’t have the patience to deal with the crowds, so I thought I’d browse at Titlewave Books a bit – I’d like to pick up some more John Buchan and Graham Greene, and have a cup of tea somewhere. Titlewave was closed. Tower Books was out of business. And I couldn’t think of any other bookstores in the neighborhood.
I sat outside Uptown Espresso with a chai and the miscellaneus bits of different newspapers that I’d scraped together. I considered the generic concert-in-a-box nature of Bumbershoot shows and the fact that both of the bands that I wanted to see were local – meaning they probably play a show here at least once a month – and decided to forget about Bumbershoot.
I walked up to Pike Place Market to check for some Buchan and Graham at the bookstores there, but had no luck.
On a whim I wandered into a little thrift store that looked like it specialized in dust. I chatted with the little old lady. (What kind of stuff do you collect? Do you want to look at baseball cards?” “Don’t go back there.”) I ruffled through a little stack of comics. It was an interesting little collection of odd ’50s and ’60s non-superhero fare. I skimmed through a no-name Mad imitation, remembering that I’d read recently that Jack Davis had worked on a couple of those things, but this wasn’t one of them. The next few were Road Runner books or something. Then there was a Dell published Mad rip-off, Yak Yak. And, speak of the devil, it had a Jack Davis cover. I flipped through the book and every page was by Davis! And at the bottom of the stack, what do you think I found? An issue of Kurtzman’s own Humbug!
The day is looking up, I’ll read the comics later. And I’ll go over to Twice Sold Tales, where I know they have some more Buchan and the Graham Greene autobiography.