Yes indeed, our initial book order has been placed, and 4,000 lovely volumes will soon be making their way toward us in snugly packed cartons. Box-cutters (and Band-Aids) at the ready, Team Malvern! Other items crossed off the To Do list this week will include phone, internet, and an alarm system (so don’t be coming around Malvern looking to knock off a few pallets of Serbian poetry… not going to happen, my friend!)

Meanwhile, our poor perfectionist painter has been driven half bats in his attempt to recreate our glorious banner (as you see at the top of this page) on the store’s back wall (pictured above—and no, that’s not a Barnett Newman hanging on the green side wall; it’s actually a window looking into the blue storage room). He painted the wall once, was unhappy with the way the text looked, painted it again, announced himself satisfied, then warned us that we must never attempt to clean or even touch the wall. At all. Ever. This was a bit of a problem, for although we fully intend to give the evil eye to any customer in possession of a leaky beverage/child, we nonetheless anticipate the possibility of spills at Malvern Books. And, in the event of such a crushing disaster, we would like the option to go to town on our wall with a roll of Bounty and a bottle of Windex. Noticing our alarm—or perhaps noticing our general propensity for making disgusting messes—he decided to spray-paint some kind of durable blue something-or-other all over the wall. Alas, this created an odd checkerboard effect. “Ah well,” we said, sensing his distress, “who needs words anyway!” We assured him that the lettering had been but a foolish dream, the daft and pointless preoccupation of decorating rubes, and then we left him alone with his wall and his roller and his soul-searching gaze off into the distance. When we returned the next day, the wall was white. Completely white. We feared he’d gone mad, but he promised us it was merely a layer of primer upon which he would daub his final coat of blue. And so he did, and the blue looked splendid. “It’s washable,” he said. We breathed a sigh of relief and dribbled coffee down our shirts in celebration. And then he added, “I shall return in ten days to do the lettering.” It sounded rather like a threat…

From wall to floor: we couldn’t resist playing peekaboo with our marmoleum river! (If linoleum is abbreviated as lino, is this… marmo? I do hope so.) We hadn’t seen the stuff in so long, we were starting to doubt its existence. But it’s still there, all blue and squiggly, waiting patiently to be walked upon by the good people of Austin.