Vertigo Books

Bookstore Yard Sale Mon., April 27 Noon-5 pm

Vertigo Books — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 13:41:59 +0000

Literary posters, memorabilia, chairs, office & retail items for book nuts, teachers, school librarians & YOU. Pick up storage units, displays, posters, file cabinets, folding chairs, cube refrigerator, a table and a bank safe will be out on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. We’ll have a couple computer desks, school locker unit, lots of baskets, a kitchen cabinet on casters and lots more. You may need to knock on the door, but stop by. Please plan to pay cash for these items. Check our events page for more details.

If you cannot make it by 5 pm, please call 301-779-9300 to arrange later pick-up.

If you have memories of Vertigo Books from Dupont Circle days or here in College Park, please stop in and share them by writing in our memory book at the front counter. We’d appreciate it. If you have any photos of Vertigo Books events, please send them to staffATvertigo-books.com.

30% off Everything

Vertigo Books — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 12:03:17 +0000

Everything is now 30% off. The discount will automagically be deducted from your total. The literary posters that we have just put out are the only exception. These are marked on the back. Fixtures, office items and storage units will be put out gradually during the week.

If you have memories of Vertigo Books from Dupont Circle days or here in College Park, please stop in and share them by writing in our memory book at the front counter. We’d appreciate it.

Thanks to all who attended the Wake & Potluck on Saturday. It was great to see so many of you. If you have any photos, please send them to staffATvertigo-books.com.

If you are visting because of Marc Fisher’s Washington Post column, you can read more about our closing, the impact of local business and visit us online here.

News of Our Demise

Vertigo Books — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 19:35:46 +0000

must be true–the obits are accumulating. We expect Saturday, April 25 to be our last day with the doors open. Shop now or forever hold your peace.

Washington Post’s Marc Fisher Getting Vertigo Over Lost Bookstores and Print Version
Washington Post’s Prince George’s Extra At Vertigo Books, the End of the Story
Washington City Paper’s City Desk This Sucks: Vertigo Books Is Closing
Baltimore Sun’s Sunday edition
Baltimore Sun’s Read Street College Park’s Vertigo Books to close
WJLA
Gazette article
Diamondback article
Diamondback column
Mark Athitakis’s American Fiction Notes Links: Keeping It Classy
We Love DC Goodbye Vertigo. You will be missed.
Examiner
Daily Candy
Minnesota indie bookseller, Monkey See Monkey Read How’s Business?
Massachusetts indie bookseller, Inkwell Books A Lesson In Class: Vertigo Books’ Autobiographical Epitaph
Mobtown Shank Indie Bookstore Who Stressed Buy Local Closes - People Weren’t Buying Local
Local blog Sad news: The cost of not shopping local.

Goodbye: We are Closing

Vertigo Books — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 20:11:17 +0000

Hello-

After seventeen and half years, the time has come. Curtains down and goodbye–in two weeks Vertigo Books will close.
Starting today, EVERYTHING IN THE STORE IS 20% OFF. If you’ve been eyeing that special something, come in and grab it now, before someone else does. And our new rules for the next couple weeks: no checks, no returns and no exchanges. Please note: we will be closed Easter Sunday, April 12, our usual hours will resume Monday

Why are we closing? There are many reasons, but basically, not enough people buy books here.

We have many loyal customers, just not enough of them, and our cloning experiments have not yielded satisfactory results. And way too many people (not you, but someone you know) are buying their books at Amazon. We’ll spare you the inside baseball stuff about the near monopolistic force Amazon has become in the industry. You can also skip to the party info at the end if you like.

Connecting the Dots
As we have said before, your shopping dollars help create the community you want to live in. For every $10 you spend at locally-owned businesses, $4.50 stays in our community. The math is simple and compelling:
Vertigo Books $4.50
Barnes & Noble/Borders/Costco $1.30
Amazon $0.00
The money you spend with locally-owned businesses continues to circulate as we pay employees, buy supplies and pay taxes that are used to provide basic services to residents.

Our local economies are key to a successful recovery from the current financial crisis. Amazon and many online retailers contribute nothing financially to our state and local economies, yet suck up an enormous amount of Maryland’s shopping dollars and compete heavily with small natural foods stores, hardware stores, bookstores and specialty stores of all kinds.

While Amazon may have made their name selling books, they want you to buy a DVD player, organic foods, power tools and pick up the latest John Grisham title when you visit their site. They actively fight any attempt to force them to collect sales tax–even in those states where they have a physical presence. Maryland Senate Bill 1071 will allow us to join other states, such as New York and Kansas, that are now collecting sales tax for online sales and using the revenue for education and public safety.

Building Community as You Shop
Building community is an ongoing process, the result of small choices made everyday. We know you understand this, but are very busy and shopping online is seductive. We sympathize and have many of the same worries. But independents live in and serve your community and make many intangible contributions. What does Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, do for our community? We are:

working for quality public schools
advocating for smart growth and sustainable development
pushing for comprehensive planning and public transit
serving on local boards and committees
supporting your causes
and operating a business that recycles, reuses and donates.

And, except for that last item, we’ll continue to do these things.

Please take a fresh look around your community, temporarily ditch the iPod, stop Facebooking and tweeting for a moment and explore your neighborhood’s businesses. Use one of the coupons below (email only) to visit new locally-owned businesses that need your support. If you want a small business to offer something else or do something differently, let them know and help them improve. If we want more than chains in the area, we need to start by supporting the local businesses we already have.

Any Excuse for a Party: Join us Saturday, April 18 5 pm-??
One of us grew up Irish Catholic and, under these circumstances, a wake is required. Bring a dish or something to drink and join us for a free form wake and potluck on Saturday, April 18 from 5 pm-?? If you shopped, read or worked here, we want to see you.

We hope Vertigo Books has served as a thoughtful literary and political gathering place, community and author resource, provided challenging, interesting conversation along with some laughter, and generally served, as one customer put it, as "an intellectual oasis on Route 1" (and previously at Dupont Circle).

Please stay in touch by sending us a note at staffATvertigo-booksDOTcom. We were never good about photographing and documenting the store’s activities. If you have event calendars, photos or memorabilia to share, please send them on. A computer with archived materials was stolen last summer, so your contributions would be much appreciated.

We owe an enormous thank you to the friends and family who made this adventure possible. We thank the many authors who so enriched these years, and our sales reps, publicists, event partners, publishers and our outstanding customers for their friendship and encouragement.

Thanks for your support over the years,
Todd Stewart, Bridget Warren &
The Staff of Vertigo Books

Nelson George

Vertigo Books — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 01:11:42 +0000

Thursday, April 2 6:30 pm
Sumner School, 17th & M St., NW

Nelson George: City Kid from Nelson George on Vimeo.
Really, you should not miss this. Good book, good writer.

Update: If you missed Nelson’s event, check out his NY Times essay and a related blog post with Vimeo slideshow. Signed books available in the store.

Best of DC 2009

ts — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 12:31:37 +0000

The Washington City Paper’s compilation of staff and readers’ pick provides a nice guide to metro DC. And, we are in it this year.

Number 1? Who cares about Number 1? The real strivers are those riding shotgun in the number 2 slot. Yeah, America loves a winner–but then they’re bored. We’re not bored.

writers doing battle

ts — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 21:35:01 +0000

I know, I know. . .literature should not be a competition. Philip Roth does not start a novel thinking, "I’m gonna take it to the hoop against Updike with this baby" (or maybe he does?). But awards do serve a purpose besides stroking the egos of certain authors, and on occasion fattening their wallets. They can alert readers to writers they may have never heard of, gaining little-known authors wider exposure. They can even alert booksellers (such as yours truly) to new authors.

The National Book Critics Circle Awards recently were awarded, and one of the fiction nominees was a book titled The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart, by first-time author M. Glenn Taylor and published by West Virginia University Press. I immediately ordered it for the store, and it certainly looks promising. It’s earned a place on my bedside table stack of books to be read, leaping past my living room table stack, dining room radiator stack, and back room at the bookstore stack(s).

In more author competition news, the nominees for the Man Booker International Prize were just announced, and it’s a pretty interesting group:
Peter Carey (Australia)
Evan S. Connell (USA)
Mahasweta Devi (India)
E.L. Doctorow (USA)
James Kelman (UK)
Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru)
Arnošt Lustig (Czechoslovakia)
Alice Munro (Canada)
V.S. Naipaul (Trinidad/India)
Joyce Carol Oates (USA)
Antonio Tabucchi (Italy)
Ngugi Wa Thiong’O (Kenya)
Dubravka Ugresic (Croatia)
Ludmila Ulitskaya (Russia)

Tabucchi’s Pereira Declares, a novel concerning Salazar’s Portugal, is one of my favorite books ever. Peter Carey is one of those writers whose every book seems a wholesale departure from what he’s done before, and everything I’ve read has been excellent, particularly Jack Maggs and My Life as a Fake. And it’s nice to see Arnost Lustig on the list, who was a long-time professor at American University. And on a somewhat silly note during this month of March Madness, check out the Tournament of Books. Personally, I’d like to see what sparks fly if Matthiessen’s Shadow Country goes up against Bolano’s 2666.

Watch it if you dare…

Vertigo Books — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 02:40:32 +0000

We knew you couldn’t resist Vincent Price…neither could we. Come in and check out this and other classic horror movies. Now on our sale table for just $6.98.

Ta-Nehisi Coates & Gwen Ifill

Vertigo Books — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 13:33:58 +0000

Some of you may remember Ta-Nehisi Coates as a Vertigo regular and erstwhile bookseller. We hope you will join us Friday and talk with Ta-Nehisi (please note this is a change from our original date). Ta-Nehisi is a careful listener and a young writer exceptionally attuned to the nuances of debate. If you are not familiar with Ta-Nehisi’s writing for the Atlantic and his blog, here’s an intro.

On January 19, 2009 Ta-Nehisi joined Rev. Joe Lowery and others to talk with Gwen Ifill. Gwen Ifill is well known for her fine work as a print journalist, at CBS and now as moderator of Washington Week and senior correspondent of The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. The Breakthrough makes us wish that she’d worked a book into her schedule a little sooner. The Los Angeles Times put it well—“a strongly reported book, with some broad conclusions drawn from scores of interviews and peppered with interesting, revealing profiles…Yet this is more than a book of connected profiles and narratives. Ifill bores at varying depths into race, class, gender and generational change.”

We Knew Him When…

bw — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 17:56:58 +0000

About 13 and half years ago, Vertigo Books hosted Barack Obama at our old location near Dupont Circle for his memoir. We were the DC stop on a modest book tour. It was August of 1995, and you know, DC in August is not a stand-out month for events. You can find street parking near Dupont Circle the town is so empty. We tried to push the event date to September, but no go.

It was, shall we say, an intimate gathering. I’d read the book and liked it, thought it a strong debut and told folks so. We discussed community organizing (I’d moved to DC to work for ACORN) and books to fill the time while a small group of regulars filtered in. As we spoke, Barack Obama listened with his now famous detachment, listening and appraising. He read fairly well–for a debut author–there were a few questions, books were signed and he was out the door. No escort as I recall.

In the DC area, we sometimes take the great diversity of voices in our daily lives for granted. Our store has always hoped to engage all American voices, but like many we thought the real change would come with our children’s generation. That’s why Monday’s book event is a special pleasure: it is an opportunity for young children and their parents to participate in the Day of Service, albeit in a small way.

In February we’ll continue the conversation with journalists and authors Ta-Nehisi Coates and Gwen Ifill.

Postscript-Vertigo has also hosted the Inaugural Poet, professor and critic Elizabeth Alexander (as well as her mother, historian Adele Logan Alexander). Elizabeth has been active for years with Cave Canem and they will be hosting an event Monday night for other Cave Canem poets.