Found out something I had been wondering about but really didn't want to know:

A Common Reader has gone out of business.

Damn. Just, damn. That makes me sad. I first got their catalog years ago, when I was in grad school - one of those serendipity-things that happened because I didn't follow my father's rule of signing up on the "no sharing my name and address list" at the library (I've gotten a lot of catalogs that went straight to the recycling pile but also got a lot of wonderful links that way). I ordered from them - rather irregularly, first because I was on a grad school budget, and then, second, when I had more money, because I didn't have as much time to read (and was honestly more prone to order from the "big boys" like Amazon. So I'm probably partly guilty for their demise).

I hadn't received a catalog from them in some months and tried going to what I remembered as their website, got a blank page - I suspected the worst. So I googled them and found Rabbit Girl's blog entry above.

I feel sad. I feel kind of the same way I felt when I learned that the Old German in Ann Arbor had closed and was replaced by a brewpub - an old friend wiped off the map.

The catalogs were lovely little things - small-format, newsprint. They had line drawings in them from some of the books featured. There were short blurbs and sometimes quotations about the books. The copywriters, whoever they were, were extremely good at making me want books and CDs that I wouldn't have considered otherwise and I was rarely disappointed when the ordered item actually came. I looked forward to the catalogs and spent much time perusing them. I think I still have one, the last one I received, on the bottom of my magazine basket, with some pages dogeared over and pencilled question marks next to a few books I was considering ordering.

RIP, Common Reader. I only hope that those who ran you - and who picked such neat books - can rise up from bankruptcy and begin a new bookselling adventure some time.