The first law of thermodynamics, applied to bookstores
Having not worked in Pioneer Square for about five months now, this article took me by surprise and bums me out big time.
David Ishii is a Pioneer Sq. staple. Every time you walk by his store, you see the back of his white hat and know that all is right in Seattle. He brought homemade popcorn balls to our office every Halloween and Christmas. They were good, too.
For those of you who don’t know Mr. Ishii or what he brought to the literary world, you have a few more weeks to check him out. I like to think of him as an older version of the lead character in High Fidelity, if he’d owned a bookstore not a record store, and wasn’t a snob.
As far as I’m concerned, bookstores are the best places on the planet. Small pockets of knowledge and open-mindedness and community. I am so pumped that my mom now owns a small pocket of her own. But in a weird conservation-of-bookstore-energy kind of way, it seems that the universe wasn’t big enough for both her store and David’s. (I’m being hugely melodramatic here. Mom’s store and David’s don’t compete, and they probably don’t even know about each other.)
The only relief I take in this article is that he’s closing for his own reasons, not because some giant conglomerate forced him to. As sad as I am that when I do venture back to P. Sq. some workday afternoon, I won’t see his white-hatted head in the window on First Ave. But I will smile at the idea of him seeing some great indie movie in the middle of the day. That’s a pretty happy retirement.