Wednesday, November 30, 2016

Holiday Deals, Hours, Updates

The 2016 Holiday Season brings some Sale Pricing to Bonnett's!

10% off nearly everything we offer through Christmas Eve!

Dec. 2nd First Friday! Find an item in any of our social media streams, show it at check out, and get an extra 15% off!

As always, quality Trade-Ins are welcome, but sale pricing does not apply to trades.

Hours! Some of you may know our 2-man operation has been halved due to a health issue. I open the shop daily, Mon-Sat as always, but am unable to arrive until mid-late afternoon. The time fluctuates, but I update my arrival time via our Facebook page & Twitter (@BonnettsBooks).

Updates! For now, look for our featured items, latest arrivals, & special selections by following @BonnettsBooks on Instagram, Twitter, Swarm, Flickr, & Pinterest.

We can be found on other sites & apps, too, but updates are infrequent, if they happen at all. Just search for Bonnett's Books or Bonnett's Book Store.

That about covers things for now. Stay tuned, Happy Holidays, and I hope to see you soon!

Thursday, November 03, 2016

2016 World Series-inspired Thoughts

These anecdotes of family history and the shop have come to mind thanks to my son, Ian, who recently saved a bunch of paternal family letters and photos from doom, including my grandparents' marriage certificate; followed with a surprise visit to the store by some of Grandma's kin.

Grandpa, Harold "Hal" Murray Bonnett, married Grandma, Ruth Adella Guy, on October 7th, 1930, during the World Series match-up between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Philadelphia Athletics. Their honeymoon was spent the next night watching the Athletics win the series in game six on a manually updated scoreboard mounted to the side of the Dayton Daily News building. Plays were called in via phone(?) and the board updated for the crowd of local baseball fans in the street below.

The last time the Cleveland Indians won the World Series was 1948 and "Bonnett's Back-Issue Magazines" was 9 years into our, now, 77 years at 502 East Fifth Street. Better luck next year, fellas!

The letters Ian found were mostly notes to home from an ancestor with Great Grandma Ruby's maiden name, Murray, who was serving in Europe during the World War (that's WWI to us today). I have yet to dive into them, but one letter, an outlier, was postmarked 1902; six years before the Chicago Cubs last World Series Championship. It's a shame our old friend, long-time customer, and die-hard Cubs fan, Bob Yaple, is no longer here for us to share the Cubs' victory with. We didn't give him an easy time of his fandom, this being "Reds Country" and all.

After 108 years, what's a little rain delay? A sign from above, perhaps; signifying the end of professional baseball's longest drought?

It was a well-earned win and I'm glad to have been around to see it! Congratulations Cubbies! Major League Baseball's World Series Champions for 2016!

Wednesday, March 09, 2016

Excerpts from: Saving the Self in the Age of the Selfie

This is a long article, worth the effort. Turn off notifications before reading... Maybe you'll leave them off afterwards.

Saving the Self in the Age of the Selfie
The American Scholar, Cover story, Spring 2016 James McWilliams, February 29, 2016

"Even as digital distraction promises to alleviate boredom, it removes from the existential equation the founding prerequisite for identity development—the individual, alone, facing nothing."

"When the smartphone transports our consciousness elsewhere, which it does every time we pick it up to avoid the stress of isolation, our most private choices suddenly hew not to the undiscovered ambitions of a curious mind, but to the commercial designs of a data-driven cloud."

"Saving the self in the age of the selfie may require nothing more or less complicated than recovering the lost art of serious reading."