We’re more or less done with the rehabilitation of the back room of the shop - no more floating crap games, bootleg DVD sales or fake I.D.s back there, just rare books. We also paired the reference and the erotica sections and put them back there - we felt like they averaged out to something fairly interesting; useful but faintly titillating.

Our interior signage should be done next week (thanks to some timely assistance - thanks Josh and Nancy!), so if you’ve been coming in and wandering about aimlessly, we’ve finally got your back.

After the move pre-math and aftermath, I’m feeling like I should get back on the eating Chaucer wagon - sort out some summer dishes, dig a pit in the yard and roast a goat if need be. I find though that I never put up the photos from the Arrivederci Pazzo party, so here they are:

Inspired by:

For many a pastee hastow laten blood
and many a Jakke of Dovere hastow sold
That hath been twice hoot and twice cold

Prologue to the Cokes tale

The cook apparently let blood out of pies - drained meat pies of the good stuff to re-use - and sold what Chaucer refers to as Jack of Dovers; pies that have been reheated. No less of a pie authority than Thomas More referred to these as “An Evil pye twyce bakken”.

We had a lovely group of small pies (pictured above) - they were more or less identical to the ones served with mortreux except the fruit was diced together more completely (this was the only real failing of that first pie - the figs, apples, pears and currants didn’t always blend evenly).

And pastez nourroys which might mean Norse Pies or nourishing pies - they seem Norse to me though. There is no recommendation as to how to cook them, but different recipes for Norse pies from the Menagier de Paris and other collections have them fried in lard. Yum. This recipe is from The Viandier de Taillvent, a recipe collection from the early 14th century generally attributed to Guillaume Tirel.

Pastez nourroys - Prenez chair cuite bien menue hachiee, pignolet, raisin de Corinde et frommage de gain esmie bien menu, et ung pou de sucre et ung petit de sel.

Take diced meat, well cooked, pine nuts, currants, crumbled rich cheese, a bit of sugar and a little salt.

We used lamb and aged cheddar - the latter because it seems properly English and dates to at least the middle of the 12th century. Half of them we fried in lard, and half we baked twice. The ones fried in lard, eaten hot, were a sybaritic out of body experience. If you haven’t fried anything in lard lately, it is a velvety pleasure you will not soon forget. As they cooled, they seemed to revert to their constituent parts, but hot and bonded together in their meat/fruit/cheese cocoon…wow. The twice baked pies were, indeed, evil.

The larded pies are around the outside, the evil pies are in the center.

Lightning took out an electrical line behind the store at around 4 today (actual according to the analog clock across the street that stopped, it was 3:54) taking our block’s electricity with it. It was pretty impressive, actually - you heard the crack of thunder overhead and the lights went right out as the sound subsided.

Yesterday, Amazon announced that they had purchased ABE books, once the premier site for used and rare books online, and still the de facto (though emphasizing de facto) choice for serious collectors. Today their site doesn’t seem to be working - I don’t think I’m reading too much into it to think that someone out there who doesn’t like Amazon is running some denial of service scheme on an easier target. I’ll look into it, could just be a coincidence.

Amazon bought Bibliofind, one of the original leaders in online used bookselling, back in 1999, and enveloped them in 2001 (interestingly, after a series of hacks on the Bibliofind site).

Update 10:45 A.M.: Site is working at least intermittently now but no announcement as to what went/is going wrong.

Update, 5:45 P.M.: Somewhat shockingly (though ABE can be pretty dicey on weekends) there is still no word on what has caused the site to be largely unavailable all day (I would call it intermittently available if I were feeling generous). They should really get some Amazon tech guys on this.

Seems to be up again. I’ve used some of this time to wonder whether the undisclosed sum that Amazon is paying for ABE will be closer to their revenue multiple of around 1.9 or Ebay’s at around twice that. Estimates for ABE’s revenue are in the $30 million range.

Last update: They finally posted a note saying that they apologized for the “brief” site outage and that everything was working again. Apparently (or allegedly) a service provider between them and the internet was down. After a bevy of booksellers lost their minds at the use of the word “brief” they removed it. Pretty funny.

Updating a previous story - cartoonist, philanthropist and bon vivant, Joe Alterio has finished his series of Robots and Monsters (and sometimes Robots with Monsters) - each robot or monster embodies three adjectives chosen by the customer, often to devastatingly apt and hilarious effect. What began as a way to raise money (each cartoon a rollicking bargain at $25) for the San Francisco AIDS committee, turned into a mammoth enterprise (after some timely blog mentions) that raised $12k in 36 hours - hopefully the book, with all 195 images, will be in the works soon.

Check out the whole series here.

Above Blondie and Angel eyes; “Good, bad, ugly”

As some of you may have noticed we have a Pazzo Books banner cleverly obscuring the Centre dancewear sign - this due to the Boston Redevelopment Authority nixing our awning application (which only took about two months from start to finish - we should have something up before the New Year, not to worry). Bummer. We’re going to have to think up something shady quick though, because around about 4:30 in the afternoon the sun hits the front of the store like Drew Barrymore hitting a pile of cinder blocks (who saw a Firestarter reference coming at the start of that sentence?). 3M apparently makes a colorless, odorless window film that turns sunlight into pure joy, so we’re looking into that and those cellular blinds that everyone is so crazy about.

Someone brought in The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Starting a Reading Group the other day and we sort of picked through it after its existence ceased to horrify us. I am not a big reading group fan, but I’m also not an ardent hater of reading groups - if people are reading, so much the better. Anyway, there is a funny section on Men’s Groups - “for whatever reason, book clubs aren’t thriving among the testosterone-toting” - you don’t say? “How do you get men to overcome the “female” feeling in the air at a reading group?” Female feeling. In The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Starting a Fight Club, there is a similarly funny section on enticing women to start their own fight club. “How do you get women to overcome that “male” feeling in the air and punch someone in the friggin’ face?” it asks. They suggest (for the former question) having good food - why not ribs and beer? Why not a tail-gate reading group? In fact, why not have it at a football game? The key to a good reading group for men is thinking outside the box - for example, they suggest “relate to them on their own terms. Disguise the high-minded narratives under the guise of generic testosterone-juiced “guy stuff”…men are simple creatures.” What you do hope is that they don’t get a hold of this book though.

They also suggest titles in good “guy” categories like fishing:

The Old Man and the Sea, A River Runs Through it, and Moby Dick. Hemingway is good for simple muscular prose and this is a real short one, so I guess it recommends itself. A River Runs Through It was enjoyable but I recollect that it was mostly about feelings, and whales, I’m afraid, aren’t fish (though it is easily pitchable as a book about a guy who hated something so much that he chased it around the world trying to kill it and ended up dead himself. That is some guy stuff!) Why not go to town and read Walton’s Compleat Angler? Big Fish was also pretty good - father’s, sons, fish - it might be about feelings too though.

They go on with the obligatory waves at Shoeless Joe and The Natural, but somehow miss Norman Mailer, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler. A guy wrote this book - imagine! and if his ideal reader weren’t so obviously a modestly happily married 35-55 white, female, suburbanite, I would have assumed he was just running guys down to pick up chicks (which was so 90s, but published in 2000, he may have been trying to sneak this one under the wire). We really are doomed - I might as well pitch the book I’ve been sitting on for a couple years before it’s too late - The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Why Men are Doomed.

Just read Mary Poppins for the first time - she’s so terribly English in the book, it’s fantastic. In the movie there’s only the barest hint of her character in the book - she’s standoffish. conceited (she loves window shopping because it allows her to admire her reflection again and again), inflexible, and humourless (no singing here), but somehow, and believably, inspires utter devotion in the children. Perhaps my favorite part is that after amazing and magical adventure after adventure, neither the children nor anyone else in the book has grown or learned a single thing. Wonderful! Haven’t we had enough of moralizing tales for children? The very idea that childish adventures have to come with a side of cauliflower-like lessons has always seemed just a little disingenuous - I recall few enough lessons from my youth, and most of them were imposed upon the events afterward and only vaguely intuited at the time.

I suppose a good parent could do the same with many of the Mary Poppins stories, but I rather like them in their picaresque and amoral state.

A first edition can be had for only $1500 - about the same as an Arthur Rackham illustrated Peter Pan first and about $40k less than a true first of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.

So we’re open - there were moments there where it seemed like it might never happen, that we weren’t progressing, only moving boxes of books from one side of the shop to another in a sisyphean mockery of progress. Not so much sisyphean, I guess, more like one of those puzzles with one empty tile space and you have to move all the other tiles around to make the picture of the cow.

Anyway, we’re open - all we have to do now is finish the back room and we’ll have a grander opening with buckler cakes and cherry lime rickeys. Yeah, cherry - we’re trying to pile onto the lime rickey war going on down the block between Sugar and the new ice cream shop. Maybe by then we’ll have our awning - we still, inanely, have the Centrestage Dancewear sign over our store - we paid the awning people to remove and dispose of it when they install the awning, so I’ll be damned if I’m taking it down now. I see it mocking me in the reflection from the windows across the street though - it may be that I’m being driven incrementally mad but it’s too incremental for me to notice. Let me know if you stop in and I seem crazier.

In more bookish news, we’ve had some nice collections come in over the past month - the remains of the impressive theological library (which also included a nice selection of poetry and French literature) of biblical scholar Samuel Terrien, who worked for years with Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr at the Union Theological Seminary, and a largish collection of scholarly film books. So come on by, and look for the Dancewear sign, you can’t miss it.

Really soft. We might not have a sign. Certain design elements may not be fully implemented (were the design elements fully implemented at the last store, you may ask), but we’ll be here, there are plenty of books, and we’re just so very pleased to have survived the moving/renovating/reshelving process. Be gentle with us though, we’re still quite fragile.

As soon as we finish off the back of the store where the rare books will be and put the finish touches on everything else, we’ll have a grander opening - probably with some Chaucerian food, maybe a shield shaped cake (the summoner is described as “A bokeleer hadde he maade hym of a cake”), who knows?

Don’t worry, we’re getting there - looks like we’ll be open by Sat the 21st of June. We’ve had some problems untangling our phone from one carrier to another (these guys don’t exactly communicate well with one another), so if you’ve tried calling us and it just rings and rings, it’s because it’s ringing off in phone purgatory somewhere, not because we don’t love you.

See you soon!

Interesting article in the globe today about the down economy hitting Roslindale. We were concerned when it didn’t even mention that we were leaving, until we noticed that they’d already taken our move into account by removing our building from the map.

I love the idea that butchers and thrift stores are counter cyclical - I used to tell anyone who would listen that this was one of the great things about a used bookstore as well. I’m not really sure it’s true in any of the three cases (certainly not for used bookstores), but it’s a good story.

Once in a while I like to take a look at web searches that landed people on the blog - here are a few winners from the last three days:

blancmange become a star (this is a mystery - an obscure synth-pop band? A rotund cricket player? I can’t figure it out)

proffessional eater (which, though misspelled landed someone on the page where I claimed my professional eater name would be The Locust - on revisiting this, it’s still true)

pickled lampreys (I get a good number of lamprey hits)

great lakes polluted (see above)

chaucer on pie

Henry Rollins (more even than lamprey I get weekly hits on my claim that Rollins pitched for the reds in the 90’s. Just a few weeks ago someone dropped me a note to let me know it wasn’t him. Luckily Tor was there to straighten the guy out. Hard core fans don’t know jack about baseball.)

Nice little article in the Bulletin about our move - you’ll notice I successfully looked as wretched as possible so that our new customers will be pleasantly surprised when they see me in person.

Mortreux, as expected, was somewhat simpler to make than blank manger but more of a challenge from an edibility standpoint. As it takes its name from the ingredients being mortared, I felt it was incumbent upon me to mortar everything - you can’t take chances with medieval cuisine.

Here’s the recipe again:

Mortrews. Take hennes and pork and seeth hem togyder. Take the lyre of hennes and of the pork and hewe it small, and grinde it al to doust; take brede ygrated and do therto, and temper it with the self broth, and alye it with yolkes of ayren; and cast theron powdour fort. Boile it and do therin powdour of gynger, sugur, safroun and salt, and loke that it be stondying; and flour it with powdour gynger.

What I did was:

Boiled a half chicken with ham hocks (I was unable, after a few tries, to procure pork liver. Who knew?) - because you use a fair amount of the resulting broth in the recipe, I reduced the stock for a while. I then stripped the chicken and the hocks and mortared the meat into a stringy mass.

Cooked about 1/2 pound of chicken livers and mortared them into a fine paste.

In the mortar, I then ground black pepper, galingal (there is some discussion on whether this is the proper medieval galingal - it’s in the ginger family), alkanet (for color, should have used more), nutmeg, and cubeb berries which was my answer to the “strong spice” in the recipe. I added that to the meat and liver and added, bread crumbs, stock, three egg yolks, and saffron. I brought it back to a boil and let it reduce until it seemed like I’d better stop. I powdered it with ginger and let it set. I did not use sugar, though, in retrospect, it probably would have been fine. With so many other flavors in there, it couldn’t have done much harm.

It ended up somewhat reminiscent of pate, though, visually, I have to admit it looked more like cat food.

Served on crusty bread, it had much more flavor than anything I’m used to - not flavor in the spicy sense, but a strange bevy of tastes that co-mingled, overlapped, and attempted to out do each other in the mouth. In this it seemed right - anachronistic, odd, and no doubt perfect if you were working with slightly spoiled meat. Honestly though, it was not bad at all - after you got over the initial shock of it not tasting like anything familiar, you sort of settled in and enjoyed it for what it was. It made a nice sandwich for lunch the next day as well. If you’re trying this at home, shoot for more pepper and less mace and nutmeg - you’ll end up with something that is, while perhaps less authentic, tastier.

The Pye was lovely though:

It contained apples, pears, figs, currants, cubeb berries, cinnamon, cardamom (green), mace, nutmeg. Here the flavors very nearly complemented each other - if you were to dice all the fruits together, and perhaps even cook them together before putting them in the coffin, I think it would be perfect. As it was, one out of every three bites had a lovely melding of flavors, but the rest seemed just slightly disconnected from the ideal Platonic PYE. We used dried figs - fresh figs would no doubt be superior.

Here’s a (slightly out of focus) cross section:

It’s true - Pazzo Books, Roslindale’s award winning bookstore is moving in May to 1898 Centre Street, West Roxbury. We’ve had a ball here in Roslindale, and we’ll miss everyone terribly (but we’ll miss you all less if you truck on over to our new location), but our business never quite developed as we’d hoped, as far as walk in traffic, and our repeated attempts to find something more central in the Square never quite panned out, for a variety of reasons.

We’ll be having a sale in May and will be looking for a home for the skee-ball (which, tragically, won’t be making the trip). Hopefully you’ll all continue to patronize Pazzo (oh, great idea Pazzo, you’re the tops, really) - we’ll be ever so conveniently located between the CVS and Roche Brothers on Centre Street (and just a block from that somewhat tragic looking Blockbuster). Why, just wander out the Roche Brothers parking lot and you’re practically there.

For all of you Rozzites who do errands in West Roxbury, we’re working on an online errand optimizer - just plug in your errands and it will show you when the optimum time to stop at Pazzo is.

We’re very excited to meet all you West Roxburians, and we hope you’ll come by early and often - we’re right next door to The Irish Cottage and the next block down from Sugar and The New Deal.

Ciao!

Updated to note that this is not an April Fool’s joke - I’m afraid we really are on the move. Also to note that the train station is right behind where the shop will be - can you imagine anything more romantic than a train journey to your local used book store? Take a loved one, take a stranger, pack a lunch.

All week the a city bus going up and down Washington St. has been backfiring aggressively every time it slows down (which typically means every time it’s outside the store) - and it’s loud, more akin to a shotgun blast than a normal car backfire. People are visibly shaken when unprepared - children cry, women swoon, men grit their teeth or howl at the heavens. It’s not pretty. What’s shocking is that this has been going on all week and either no one has complained (impossible) or no one is interested.

It was the 50 Bus last time I saw, but they change at Forest Hills. Maybe they can’t keep track of which one is backfiring so they can’t fix it. Seems like a Kafka or Gogol story with some beleaguered bus inspector always one step behind, feverishly trying to do his job which seems increasingly impossible and pointless. Poor guy.

It occurs to me that this dish could be especially unpleasant to eat unless handled with extreme care. Now I’m picturing something more along the lines of a paté than a meat/liver soup, but this still doesn’t save the dish from the sugar and ginger. Luckily, the recipe for the concoction referred to as strong spice has been lost, so I get to make up anything reasonable - still, this little bit of latitude is going to have to go a long way.

As to pies: Chaucer was probably talking about fish or meat pies, so, though Apple Pye was around (before America! Imagine!) and relatively common in England and France, I may have to go with the savory variety of pie - maybe fish, it being Lent and all. Or both.

Here’s a 14th century recipe for apple pie:

XXIII. FOR TO MAKE TARTYS IN APPLIS.

Tak gode Applys and gode Spycis and Figys and reysons and Perys and
wan they are wel ybrayed colourd [1] wyth Safroun wel and do yt in a
cofyn and do yt forth to bake wel.

And fish pie:

XXV. FOR TO MAKE TARTYS OF FYSCH OWT OF LENTE.

Mak the Cowche of fat chese and gyngener and Canel and pur’ crym of
mylk of a Kow and of Helys ysodyn and grynd hem wel wyth Safroun and
mak the chowche of Canel and of Clowys and of Rys and of gode Spycys
as other Tartys fallyth to be.

These two really bring minimalism to a new level.

I’ve been lax - my inability to find a legal way to procure peacock had me down - they run the streets of Miami wild and carefree, why can’t I eat one? I’ve debated the merits of Turkish Partridge versus the more genuine English grey partridge and the sort of genuine French red-legged partridge. The former is easily obtainable, the second endangered and the third somewhere in between but, unlikely in any case, to be found in Massachusetts. Is sea bream an appropriate substitute for Chaucer’s breem (And many a breem and many a luce in stuwe)? Would tiger muskie be permissible in lieu of pike?

Difficult and weighty questions, there is no doubt. But we forge onward for we are, after all, forgers and hungry.

So while the fowl and thousand thousand slimy questions get sorted out, we will eat Mortreux and a pie.

From Forme of Cury, ca. 1390.

Mortrews. Take hennes and pork and seeth hem togyder. Take the lyre of hennes and of the pork and hewe it small, and grinde it al to doust; take brede ygrated and do therto, and temper it with the self broth, and alye it with yolkes of ayren; and cast theron powdour fort. Boile it and do therin powdour of gynger, sugur, safroun and salt, and loke that it be stondying; and flour it with powdour gynger.

Take chicken and pork and boil them together. Take the livers of the chicken and pork and dice it and then grind it finely (to dust, as suggested, sounds difficult. trans. note); throw in some bread crumbs and mix in some broth (from boiling the chicken and pork earlier), some egg yolks and strong spices. Boil it adding ginger, sugar, saffron and salt and let set (it should be more or less a solid at the end of this, apparently). Sprinkle on ginger.

Next I will pick out a pie and get to cooking.

Darwin, 1809 - 1882

Bryant, 1794 - 1878

Bryant suspiciously published “Poetical Works. Collected and arranged by the author” in 1879, a year after he “died”.

Go forth under the open sky, and list
To Nature’s teachings, while from all around—
Earth and her waters, and the depths of air—
Comes a still voice

From Thanatopsis; another mystery, solved.