Results tagged “literature” from Uncivil Society
Man, this hurts. One of the things I'm doing now is pulling together work for a side project for later this summer, for which I needed some rare Russian books. I knew exactly where to go: Victor Kamkin Books, my old haunt in NYC in law school and, since that store shut down, in Maryland just a short hop from my in-laws.
I knew the Rockville, MD store moved a couple towns over recently after some financial trouble, but I wasn't prepared for the image above: their inventory destroyed, in keeping with the local sheriff's orders, after the store missed rent payments.
400,000 Russian books destroyed, with the remaining 150,000 presumably gone soon afterward. Much of this--assuming the stock remained consistent with what it had been for decades--was rare historic material you'd simply not be able to find anywhere else in the U.S.
Sometimes, sad to say, manuscripts do burn.
Dennis the Menace today is pretty safe--cute kid doing adorable things, upright parents, blah. Back in the 1950s, though, the strip was surprisingly subversive. Dennis is like the devil in Faust or Master and Margerita--his mischief exposes the more pervasive problems beneath the surface in suburban American. Basically, it's Blue Velvet with a six-year-old Dennis Hopper.
