iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

The Haunted Bookshop @thehauntedbookshop.com · 4h

If someone put together a bookshop event moderating a discussion between Jim Crace and Daniel Kraus, I would go. (We don't do events here for lack of space, which I don't always regret, but right now I do.)

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The Haunted Bookshop @thehauntedbookshop.com · 11h

*I will always purchase designs created with human skill and imagination. I do not intend to stock products designed, in whole or in part, by AI. This policy decision is based on several factors, most importantly a concern for the rights of artists who remain uncompensated for "training materials".

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The Haunted Bookshop @thehauntedbookshop.com · 11h

Jigsaw puzzlers: I have learned that two puzzles currently in stock here were created with "AI assistance" 🙃 Respect to the manufacturer for disclosing this, though. I like what they've done with the "AI Transparency" tab: www.cobblehillpuzzles.com/products/cat...

cobblehillpuzzles.com

Cats Chillin with Books | 500 piece | AI Assisstance

“Books. Cats. Life is good.” Edward Gorey certainly understood the simple pleasures in life. His intricate pen-and-ink style may well have inspired the delightfully detailed cat illustrations of Kitty...

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The Haunted Bookshop @thehauntedbookshop.com · 18h

The reaction at this end: ... ... ... 🤣 Day made 🙏

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The Haunted Bookshop @thehauntedbookshop.com · 04/10/2026

A 1939 printing of this small but potent collection (first published by Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company in 1927). Sure, it's a subsequent edition. But MY copy is only gently faded along the spine... and it has the POI of Alan Clodd. Yeah, THAT Alan Clodd.

This copy of James Joyce's Pomes Penyeach is a five inch by seven inch, pamphlet stitched chapbook with a kelly green cover showing only a touch of sunning along the spine, two thin gray lines at upper and foreedge, and minor corner wear. If it was printed in 1939, it was probably the last issue during Joyce's lifetime.

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The Haunted Bookshop @thehauntedbookshop.com · 02/10/2026

NEW ARRIVALS with our pet owl! Or at least, that's Sophie's current attitude. Ominously fluffed. She's still getting used to Ande 😂 Place your order via 319-337-2996 or infodesk@thehauntedbookshop.com - We ship! Or stop by 219 N Gilbert Street, Iowa City, 11-6 Central Mon-Sat.

A long-haired tortoiseshell cat with a white stripe across her face like David Bowie on the cover of "Aladdin Sane". She has pulled her head back toward her shoulders and fluffed out her ruff; her ears are angled lower than usual; the overall effect is that of a great horned owl with a cute pink nose instead of a beak. Behind her, a blue sky and part of a person trapped under the cat (who has a tendency to jump in people's laps and demand attention).

Thirtyish books arranged on two carpeted steps. This is mostly fiction, including classics by authors like James Baldwin, Jose Saramago, Isabel Allende, Louise Erdrich, Joseph Roth, Albert Camus, Jack London, Herman Melville, Charles Dickens, etc. as well as the Oxford Classics anthology of the Anglo-Saxon world, some classic Greek tragedies, and a giant volume of George Orwell's essays.

A selection of nonfiction, including a book about the Abbey of St. Gall, a coffee-table book about libraries, two neat rows of books about gardening (including a picture book about Tasha Tudor and her garden), Henry David Thoreau's "Wild Fruits", Eugene Robinson's "Freedom Lost, Freedom Won", some history and politics, and memoirs by Rob Spillman and Maxine Hong Kingston

More nonfiction, this time with some medieval history, the memoirs of Casanova in six volumes, books about the Cold War, Philip Caputo's "A Rumor of War", some popular science titles, a Classical Greek textbook, Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood", and Michael Dirda's "Browsings", which would make an excellent gift for a book lover, especially if paired with a book by Nicholas Basbanes, of which we have a few.

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The Haunted Bookshop @thehauntedbookshop.com · 01/10/2026

There are always good people out there in the world, and you, my friend, are one of them. I'm glad to know you.

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The Haunted Bookshop @thehauntedbookshop.com · 01/10/2026

*I use the block button at the first sign of trouble, and I turn off comments if people are using them to harm, hinder, or harass others. Don't be the reason.

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The Haunted Bookshop @thehauntedbookshop.com · 01/10/2026

The simple fact is this: Every time one man forces a woman to make a practical judgement call (and one of his buddies trashes the woman for her call, and three buddies go along, and five just stay silent), that woman loses opportunity. And men don't even get that opportunity. It's just lost.

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The Haunted Bookshop @thehauntedbookshop.com · 01/10/2026

And that means I have less time, energy, opportunity to spend on the valuable thing I do, which, if done as wisely as possible, would benefit thousands in proportion to where they're starting from. Including men. But if I choose not to play their microaggressionball, I risk the whole purpose.

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The Haunted Bookshop @thehauntedbookshop.com · 01/10/2026

For me to succeed in my chosen pursuit, I perform a constant calculus: is this man receptive to argument, and if not, can he be satisfied with a compromise, and if so, how much, and if not and I make him mad, what is he going to do, and and and That's all time, energy, money, and purpose wasted.

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The Haunted Bookshop @thehauntedbookshop.com · 01/10/2026

(I can only speak as a white, middle aged, female presenting person, but) I'm not going to study the problem in the free time I don't have so that I can present a carefully worded proposal to be shot down instantly. I have a vision. I can pursue it, or I can appease. I choose pursuit.

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The Haunted Bookshop @thehauntedbookshop.com · 01/10/2026

And turned another way, these lost opportunities - the ones avoided due to danger, and the little daily surrenders to assumptions (because giving up is the only practical option) - cost. men. too. No, I don't know how to fix it. Even though that's a burden I'm assumed to be willing to accept.

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The Haunted Bookshop @thehauntedbookshop.com · 01/10/2026

I raise the point because there's a valuable thread today about women losing opportunities because they exit situations that don't feel safe. That's 100% real. But those aren't even the only times we lose out to the masculine assumption that we must play calvinball or willingly give up.

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The Haunted Bookshop @thehauntedbookshop.com · 01/10/2026

Few men believe that I, a female presenting person, could really know how to value what they're selling. My offer is either too small, or insulting. 👉 They cannot imagine that I have reasons, so they are not open to persuasion. 👈 They don't learn, let alone gain, from this experience.

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The Haunted Bookshop @thehauntedbookshop.com · 01/10/2026

Ande still hides behind and under furniture for much of the day, but he is venturing out a bit, especially in search of cheek rubs. Look how trusting this guy is. He's leaning at least 30* into my hand. And his buff-colored fluff makes chinchilla fur seem coarse.

A very light orange tabby cat with very leonine features and very large paws tilts hard to one side, pushing his ear and jaw against a human's hand. His eyes are squinched up in pleasure and he is leaning about as far as he can without tipping over.

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The Haunted Bookshop @thehauntedbookshop.com · 29/09/2026

Nothing quite like making a scholar's day by having an incredibly obscure book on hand. By the way... I have a lot of fiction, cultural theory, and history auf Deutsch right now. Send me a list of authors or types of books you want; I'll watch for them while sorting these 16(!) boxes 🇩🇪

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The Haunted Bookshop @thehauntedbookshop.com · 28/09/2026

Ethnoentomology. Folklore of various fauna. Scary death poppies. The history of book illustration. I wasn't going to get out of @lornebairrarebooks.bsky.social 's current book sale without buying anything, but... if you don't see me for a week, it's because I'm researching* my purchases. *reading

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The Haunted Bookshop @thehauntedbookshop.com · 27/09/2026

Some people know zip codes, I know ISBNs 😂 My favorite is 978087745- (University of Iowa Press) but after a long day of pricing Spanish theology and old missals, it's just so much easier to do some Oxford University stuff, which is familiar enough that I know who wants what.

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The Haunted Bookshop @thehauntedbookshop.com · 27/09/2026

Today in "compliments I have given": "If he'd told me I should be a housepainter, I'd smell like turpentine instead of lignin." Here's to you, Kirk Daddow of Ames High School 🍷

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The Haunted Bookshop @thehauntedbookshop.com · 26/09/2026

The kind of day on which I see "978015-" and think "oh thank goodness, finally"

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The Haunted Bookshop @thehauntedbookshop.com · 26/09/2026

YOU ROCK 🤩 This makes so much about this book make more sense. Thank you!

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The Haunted Bookshop @thehauntedbookshop.com · 26/09/2026

I can't help being fascinated 👀 He goes into a trance during the dissolution of the monasteries. When Petroc wakes up, he's frightened, but he's comforted by the sound of Latin. His modern counterparts worry that he won't handle modern Christmas well because it's so pagan.

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The Haunted Bookshop @thehauntedbookshop.com · 26/09/2026

It's like that old (possibly apocryphal) story about Disney instructing the team on the animated "Beauty and the Beast" not to watch the Cocteau film, only to have multitudes of visual references to the Cocteau throughout. Do time-travel authors realize this book anticipates a lot of their tropes?

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The Haunted Bookshop @thehauntedbookshop.com · 26/09/2026

S.M.C., in case you didn't know, is the very secret pen name of Sister Mary Catherine. I'm still trying to figure out who she is, but she was a relatively prolific author. What I want to know is, have any of the major time-travel romance writers read this book?

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The Haunted Bookshop @thehauntedbookshop.com · 26/09/2026

Busy day, lots of medieval history to process, but I've gotten sidetracked by a cheap paperback. "Brother Petroc's Return", by "S.M.C.", is basically a time travel romance except the romance part is monastic devotion 🤔 He goes into a trance in Henry VIII's England and wakes up in the 20th century.

A mass market paperback book published by Doubleday Image in the 1950s. The cover has a very boxy monastery perched on a cliff overlooking the sea; the land is brown and has a stone wall and a bare tree, and the sea is just several distant squiggles under a matching gray-blue sky. This book has tea droplet spots, creased corners, a felt-tip mark over the original price, scuffs along the bottom front, and more - it is what book dealers call "good", by which we generally mean you can read it just fine, but it is not gift quality - and I should absolutely not be obsessing over this, because it has negligible market value, but seriously, it was written in the 1930s and it anticipates the tropes of an entire subgenre of 'he came from an earlier time and must now learn about modern life and find a place for himself in it' stories. Like, did Jack Finney read this? Diana Gabaldon? I want to know!

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The Haunted Bookshop @thehauntedbookshop.com · 24/09/2026

This just in: His name shall be Menander, and you can call him And or Andy for short. (He joined Sophocles "Sophie" and Aeschylus "Esk" on our staff a week ago Sunday and is still mostly hiding under the couch, but he gets more comfortable in his new home every day.)

A very pale orange cat with tabby stripes around his very leonine eyes. He is unselfconsciously smooshing his forehead against a human's hand. His fur looks, and in fact is, softer than a rabbit's. What's not quite clear in this picture is that he also has huge feet. Huge. Also very leonine. And did I mention that he's gorgeous?

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The Haunted Bookshop @thehauntedbookshop.com · 24/09/2026

NEW ARRIVALS with Menander! Place your order via 319-337-2996 or infodesk@thehauntedbookshop.com - We ship! Or stop by 219 N Gilbert Street, Iowa City, 11-6 Central Mon-Sat.

Close-up of a pale orange cat with tabby markings around his eyes, lying on his side under a beat-up old loveseat. His eyes are slightly squinty in the way that cats show affection; one paw is raised, ready to touch your finger if you put your hand out in front of him. He likes touching your hands with his paws. Also, he's beautiful. Not that I'm biased.

About forty books, mostly soft-cover, arranged on two carpeted steps. Authors include David Lodge, Sherman Alexie, Vincente Blasco Ibanez, Gloria Naylor, Colm Toibin, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Jose Saramago, Penelope Fitzgerald, D. H. Lawrence, and a row of crime fiction by Georges Simenon, Donna Leon, Jacqueline Winspear, et al.

Not quite forty more books, again fiction for the most part, with the exception of a memoir by Yiyun Li, poetry by Federico Garcia Lorca and Homer, graphic work by Marjane Satrapi and Art Spiegelman, some classic mysteries by Wilkie Collins, R.A. Dick, Dorothy Sayers, P.D. James, but also John Copenhaver's "The Savage Kind"; in the next row, everybody from Don Delillo to Henry Miller to Thomas Pynchon to a reproduction of a Nonesuch Dickens volume (David Copperfield). A couple of these have sold; call or email for further information.

Nonfiction time! An atlas of world history in German, books from the history of ideas and philosophy, some European history - back to Byzantium and forward to the Balkan wars - and the excellent book "Germans Into Nazis" by Peter Fritzsche. Also, some narrative nonfiction about the experience of nature, a little medieval art and literature, and Patricia Hampl's book about visiting Spillville, Iowa, while researching Anton Dvorak.

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The Haunted Bookshop @thehauntedbookshop.com · 24/09/2026

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The Haunted Bookshop @thehauntedbookshop.com · 24/09/2026

You're not alone, my friend. May the words arise unbidden one day!

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The Haunted Bookshop @thehauntedbookshop.com · 24/09/2026

Someday, somebody will find my palimpsest. When I was a student going to book readings, I usually couldn't afford an author's new book, so I asked them to sign my Complete Shakespeare. Which is why it's signed by John Updike, Mark Strand, Leslie Feinberg, William Kittredge, and dozens more 😂

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The Haunted Bookshop @thehauntedbookshop.com · 24/09/2026

But books like this one I found today, or like a diary, a research notebook, that appointment book - they belong where they will be valued: - returned, if sold in error - donated, if an institution wants it - offered to relevant parties (family, department) - given to the right reader 📚❤️

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The Haunted Bookshop @thehauntedbookshop.com · 24/09/2026

Sometimes (hear me out) a book with unusual qualities should be sold at a price reflecting cultural value. - To establish a fair price - To create a sales record that protects the collector's interest and informs future collecting - To draw the attention and interest of collectors and academics

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The Haunted Bookshop @thehauntedbookshop.com · 24/09/2026

The former student needed, for reasons involving personal matters of faith, a copy of that book, and to have that professor's copy made it even more meaningful. I donated a bookseller's appointment diary to a multi-author archive because several of the authors had given readings at his shop.

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The Haunted Bookshop @thehauntedbookshop.com · 24/09/2026

I disagree with zero of your thoughts here. There have been many books over the years that I chose not to sell... because I knew where the book should go. Once, when a certain professor passed away, I gave his working copy of one particular book to a former student who had been a great admirer.

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Adam Steinbaugh @adamsteinbaugh.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

BREAKING: An Iowa state court dismisses President Donald Trump’s frivolous lawsuit against veteran pollster J. Ann Selzer (represented by @thefireorg.bsky.social) and the Des Moines Register newspaper, a victory for First Amendment rights. Opinion here: www.fire.org/research-lea...

This case sets a President, a member of Congress, and a former state senator against a pollster and a newspaper, and it arises out of an election. A case of that kind invites the reader to look for a political result. The Court’s role is narrower. It is to sit as an impartial arbiter, to apply the law without passion or prejudice, and to rule without regard to the politics of the day. As such, the only question before the Court is whether the Petition states a claim the law recognizes. At its core, the Plaintiffs’ Petition seeks to stretch both Iowa statutory and common law beyond their current bounds, turning speech that enjoys the highest category of First Amendment protection into a liability. After considering the parties’ arguments, the Court must conclude that the protection is too great and the reach is too far. The case must therefore be dismissed.

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The Haunted Bookshop @thehauntedbookshop.com · 23/09/2026

This is such a question. Thousands of possibilities, some comic, some tragic, situated in contexts for which my best clues right now are the other books this author chose to let go. The author also happens to be a fascinating person, I am learning from these notes, because I'm that kind of snoop 😂

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The Haunted Bookshop @thehauntedbookshop.com · 23/09/2026

Marius the Epicurean and Forrest Gump: Discuss.

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The Haunted Bookshop @thehauntedbookshop.com · 23/09/2026

I wonder if Michael Rosenblatt (of "Bookworm") wrote in his books 🤔

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The Haunted Bookshop @thehauntedbookshop.com · 23/09/2026

You're so right! Offering to an appropriate archive is always a first step when we get a book as artifact. So important to preserve what we can of the *process* of a book!

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The Haunted Bookshop @thehauntedbookshop.com · 23/09/2026

Hugely important point. This one was given up deliberately, this time, but I have various personal notebooks, annotated books, etc. that are waiting here, just in case. One is the professional diary of a parent whose child will likely return one day; I'll save it 'til they get here.

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The Haunted Bookshop @thehauntedbookshop.com · 23/09/2026

I saved the author's email address. When they get settled in the next stage of their life, I plan to write, for several reasons (because they're really cool, mainly), but yes - I will ask

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The Haunted Bookshop @thehauntedbookshop.com · 23/09/2026

❤️📚 agreed! If I went back for a Master's, I would probably want to do a thesis on reception studies, specifically focusing on exactly this kind of object: the book as asynchronous conversation

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The Haunted Bookshop @thehauntedbookshop.com · 23/09/2026

So what does it mean that this author gave up this book, this body of labor, this progress? The author has finished the book. I know a couple of authors (it's Iowa City), and I have a sense for how hard it is to be *done* with a career's worth of work. A little awed, and a little sad, over here.

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The Haunted Bookshop @thehauntedbookshop.com · 23/09/2026

Academics are as variable as any other group of humans, so some of them publish and just move on to the next project. Not this one. The notes demonstrate irrefutably that this author was ready to prepare a second edition, and possibly to write another book in this particular area.

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The Haunted Bookshop @thehauntedbookshop.com · 23/09/2026

I don't generally sell books in this condition - my rule is that a book must be accessible to a future reader, and this has too many notes for that - so it's going to be a freebie for a regular who works in the same field. It's got me wondering, though. The author is still alive.

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The Haunted Bookshop @thehauntedbookshop.com · 23/09/2026

Today, in my stack of books to catalogue, I find a very battered hardcover published by a university press. It has underlining, highlighting, and flocks of post-notes perched along the head- and foreedges*, each peppered with notes. This was the author's own working copy of their book.

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The Haunted Bookshop @thehauntedbookshop.com · 22/09/2026

Happy to report that the signed copy of Toni Morrison's "Home" did go to a wonderful person ❤️📚

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