books: power outage

Once every few years our power goes out for an extended period, which wildly disorients the American Consumer.

We stay open if there's daylight- the shop gets murky, but aside from the natural history room there's enough ambient light to reward motivated browsers. Today we went dark from 3 to 5, drawing from customers a steady stream of pointless queries & leaden japes ("It's dark in here."  "Are you conserving power?").

An interesting evolution from our last extended outage- cell phone flashlights.
At one point there were four separate beams piercing the shadowy nooks of the main room, customers acting out the old bookstore joke about the shop you need a sack lunch and a flashlight to fully explore.