Parisian Phoenix Publishing

Creating Books that Promote Unique Voices and Diverse Perspectives

Contact founder Angel Ackerman at angel@parisianphoenix.com

On bookstores and Bibles

Published by

Angel Ackerman

6 Nov 2024

If you are a regular around here, you may know that Gayle Hendricks and I went to Massachusetts November 2 so that we could visit the museum of printing.

We also visited Mystic, Connecticut; Andover, Massachusetts; Lowell, Massachusetts; and New Haven, Connecticut.

Bookstores

E.H. Jacobs held his book launch for Splintered River at Andover Bookstore, so we decided to stop by. Andover definitely reminded me of Bethlehem, Pa., especially since Andover Bookstore and Moravian Book Shop both make some claims regarding longevity. Moravian Book Shop was founded in 1745 and says it is the “oldest continuously operating bookstore in the United States” and the second oldest in the world. Andover opened in 1809 and calls itself America’s oldest independent bookstore, probably because of Moravian’s history as being an outreach of the Moravian Church.

In Lowell, we went to LaLa Books since E.H. Jacobs has an author event there this weekend. I introduced myself and left some material, as I believe Splintered River is the only book on the list published by a small press instead of being self-published.

I loved thow town and I loved this store. LaLa Books had the ambience and feel of a bookstore in some quiet, trendy town, but it was nestled between transportation history, an arts district and was part of some urban revitalization. The city has a population of more than 100,000.

Yale’s Gutenberg Bible

The Museum of Printing had a Bible room to emphasize the Bible’s importance in the development of mechanical printing and it’s role in facilitating written language for a lot of non-European cultures that only had oral language. Missionaries learned these languages and created Bible translations in those tongues.

When we discovered that Yale had a Gutenberg Bible on display at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, we decided to stop on the way home and even stumbled upon lexicographer Noah Webster‘s grave, yes of dictionary fame.

Once again, I found myself dumbfounded by the sheer scale of books and materials in the rare book library– it was a six-story glowing cube of valuable manuscripts.

Rare books like the Gutenberg Bible get their pages turned gently and regularly, so theoretically over a very long period of time and with a lot of visits and even more patients, one could “read” the whole Bible.