A new hassle-free online book ordering service comes to Commercial Drive

The past Christmas shopping season was a disappointment at best and more likely a disaster for North American retailers big and small. Not all of the declining sales can be attributed to volatile economic news dominating the business press. For the first time, online purchasing took a noticeable bite out of traditional purchasing at so-called bricks-and-mortar retailers. The economy may be headed for a recession and home-owners may be getting tossed out of doors by the thousands by distressed banks, but these cycles, though perhaps more amplified than usual this time around, inevitably reverse themselves in time. But the portion of all consumer purchasing now taken up by online vendors is not a cyclical phenomenon and will only increase with time.

It is in this context that Magpie book and magazine store on Commercial Drive has introduced a marketing innovation combining the best of both worlds to ensure its health and vitality as a community bookstore through all the retailing tribulations yet to come. Starting this week, Magpie now offers an online book ordering service. By simply giving the store a title and paying the cover price, customers leave it to Magpie to search the book, order it, manage the online payment, and receive the book from the delivery company. The customer simply returns in a week or so and picks it up.

While online purchasing of books directly by customers has been a boon to publishers and readers alike, many book buyers either do not have a computer, lack online access, don’t have a credit card, or are nervous about transmitting their credit card numbers over the net. Many don’t want delivery people showing up at their door or can’t arrange to be at home when deliveries are made. Furthermore, online buyers are often confused and surprised by extra charges for shipping and customs brokering and are frustrated by having no human to take problems to if problems arise.

Additionally, people are increasingly wary of authorities gaining knowledge of what they read and fear delivery people peering into their homes as they are commanded to by Homeland Security laws in the US. Finally, searching online is itself often too frustrating and confusing for book buyers looking to purchase one particular book. The amount of information required by online book vendors is enough to put many potential buyers off.

All of those concerns are addressed by Magpie’s new service. All a customer has to do is give the store a title and lay down some cash, and come back a week or so later to pick up their book.

No fuss, no muss, no paper or electronic trail, no hassles with delivery, no confusing or surprise charges, no missed deliveries and no time lost sitting at your computer searching for the field in which you made some disallowed entry.

For the community, it means the small bookstore has opened up the inventory of the whole world’s books of any kind and language with all the ease and convenience of simply dropping by a bookstore. And the price will always be the list price for the book, never more, and there will never be any hidden or extra fees. Best of all, rather than buying from big corporate outfits, customers can get any book in the world and still keep their spending dollars local, supporting the independent small businesses that so enrich their own local community.

Give the Magpie Online Book Ordering Service a try. You’ll find it a very pleasant way to buy books.

Famous Empty Sky takes a knotted turn

Those familiar with East Vancouver artist Famous Empty Sky’s yellow, orange and white-dominated collage works of the past 15 years (a large piece hangs permanently by the escalators on the third floor of the Vancouver Public Library) are in for a surprise at her show of new work opening at Havana on Commercial Drive, February 17. For starters, her new direction is dominated by black.

“Nnots” features configurations of crumpled and knotted paper and fabric compositions set floating against ethereal deep-space skies. The stark abstract shapes arising from the creases and flows, some symmetrical others asymmetrical, suggest all manner of organic internal body parts, insect faces or tribal masks.

There is also something secretive and intimately exposed in this series of works. Viewing them, I had a feeling of reverence and quietude of the kind one feels when viewing the creased fabric-surrounded body of a deceased lying exposed for viewing in the hushed confines of the funeral home. And it wasn’t because I happened to view her work on Ash Wednesday, as Famous Empty Sky noted. Nor was the experience really about death, but rather life, also in the manner one can feel in the funeral home. The colours in the crumpled and knotted paper and fabric, actually photographs glued onto the blackened canvases, then painted in and highlighted before tiny details—dots, figures, sometimes what appears to be tiny hieroglyphs of some forgotten language—give a sense of flowering re-birth. Vivid blues, muted yellows and other off-whites, and greens create a shimmer to these works. The extraordinary depth achieved by the artist through several layers of work building up the pictures takes the viewer deep inside the quiet, private other world the artist has uncovered.

Famous Empty Sky told me the compositions aren’t planned but they are channeled in a sense. When she’s creating them, she is more a cipher than an artist, as though the pictures are working themselves through her rather than the other way around. She was first disturbed by her turn to black, she said, explaining that that’s where the 21st Century seems to have taken her. Her studio, upstairs in her character-infused house overlooking Grandview Park, is all hung about with pictures in various stages of completion. One, a larger unusual picture featuring three knots, she told me, is intimidating her at the moment. She’s unsure how to approach the highlighting and outlining on it, but she says she’s assured she’ll figure it out.

There’s no question something profound is being said in these pictures, in the most powerful way—a secretive whisper. The world of experience, Famous Empty Sky explained, squishes down a funnel, and out the tiny hole at the bottom comes art as a distillate. The simplicity of her paintings seem just that—some essence of a broad observation of the whole world, distilled over and over again to a knotted shape floating in deepest space.

Her show runs February 17 to February 29, at Havana, 1212 Commercial Drive.