Daily Prompt

In Honor of #IndependentBookstoreDay

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

April 28, 2018, is Independent Bookstore Day. For most of the 1990s, I was employed in an independent bookstore in New Paltz, New York. If you are a fan of books and of locally owned businesses and live near an independent bookstore, any excuse to visit your local bookstore is a good reason to visit it.

(Especially booksellers that specialize in used books; the perfume of used books ought to be bottled and sold, but then again, it already is: in old books.)

Huffington Post last year published a list of fifty popular independent bookstores located across the country; I have been in three of the fifty (numbers 4, 13, and 28) and number 28 has employed and still employs co-workers from my old bookseller.

A column of mine from 2015:
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Hometowns

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

One of the unique things that is somehow common to many people (we are all alike in our uniqueness) is a stated belief that our hometown is no place special. We are taught to be humble, so anyplace that our humble selves hail from must be thought of as not all that special, either.

This often masks a fierce inner secret belief that one’s hometown is in fact the best place to be from and (insert name of a higher power one believes in here), please help those who chose to be born somewhere else, especially those unlucky ones born in the nearest next neighboring town. Those people are the unluckiest of all, perhaps because they were born so near to our town’s obvious greatness but they were not, which renders all the more dramatic their failure at their life’s first and easiest task: pick the right place to be born.
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A Timely Definition of ‘Time’

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Samuel Johnson wrote, “He that hopes to look back hereafter with satisfaction upon past years must learn to know the present value of single minutes, and endeavor to let no particle of time fall useless to the ground.”—Rambler 108, March 30, 1751

Dr. Johnson was 41 in March of 1751 and several years into his work on his most lasting project, his Dictionary. Unlike most of the dictionaries developed for any language, and all dictionaries in English, Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language was written by one man. An entire dictionary, with more than 40,000 word entries and over 100,000 literary quotations to back up and explain Johnson’s definitions and create an etymology (the study of the origin of words). It took Johnson nine years to complete it; 75 years later, Noah Webster published his own dictionary, which had 70,000 entries, took 25 years to complete, and cites Johnson throughout. The first completed edition of the Oxford English Dictionary took 75 years and dozens of scholars to compile its first edition, published in 1928.
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