Thank you, Wessel & Lieberman

Sad, sad news today as Wessel & Lieberman Booksellers, here in Seattle for 22 years, announced via their customer email list that they are closing down their business and liquidating their stock.

This is a huge loss for bibliophiles in the Pacific Northwest, as Wessel & Lieberman is probably our finest storefront bookshop, a real Seattle institution.  They are especially strong in PNW books, natural history, mountaineering books, and all sorts of 19th Century arcana.

They simply have no lousy books, none at all.  Everything is worth seeing, reading, and owning.

They promise to be open at their store in Pioneer Square through June, so I will make numerous forays over my lunch hour down to see them.  They have a copy of Rousseau's Confessions I need to snag, and definitely a few more, once I sort through the stacks slowly and methodically.

I can't think of any better way to say "thank you" for their very existence, than to post the best I can remember of what I have bought from them over the years.  This list is not complete -- I know I'm overlooking a lot of pulp here.

See them before they are gone ... Thank you so much, Mark Wessel and Michael Lieberman.

Edmund Burke, Conciliation with the Colonies, Allyn & Bacon, 1920  

Robert L. Wood, Trail Country: Olympic National Park
(signed 1st ed), Mountaineers, 1968 

Oswald Spengler, Man and Technics (1st ed), Knopf, 1932 

alberto giacometti, Museum of Modern Art, 1965

Robert L. Wood, Men, Mules and Mountains: Lieutenant O'Neill's 
Olympic Expeditions (signed 1st ed), Mountaineers, 1976

John McPhee, La Place de la Concorde Suisse (1st ed), FSG, 1984

Alan Moorehead, A Late Education (1st US ed), Harper & Row, 1970

Robert L. Wood, Across the Olympic Mountains, the Press Expedition, 1889-90 
(signed 1st ed), Univ. of Washington Press, 1967

Washington Irving, Rip Van Winkle, Lippincott

Ben Franklin, Autobiography, Modern Library, 1944

H. L. Mencken, A Book of Burlesques, Knopf, 1925

H. L. Mencken, Christmas Story (1st ed), Knopf, 1946

George Orwell, Animal Farm (1st US ed), Harcourt Brace & Co, 1946 

M. Cléry,  A Journal of The Terror, The Folio Society, 1955

William H. McNeill, Hutchins' University: A Memoir of the
University of Chicago, 1929-1950, Chicago, 1991