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One of my Childhood Bookstores is The Other Change of Hobbit, a Berkeley institution since the week Star Wars opened in 1977. It's a tiny, tiny little store, filled with sf/f, and anime, and mysteries, and quite possibly the only place in the East Bay where you can find E.E. "Doc" Smith and Burroughs and all those other Historical Folks. Most of my History of SF/F reading comes from OCoH.
And one of the only places in the Bay Area where you can walk in and say "okay, look, I read this short story when I was a kid, in a collection designed for kids with a pink elephant on the cover, and it was about this evil alien that's telepathic and disappeared when people didn't believe in it." And they'll say ... well, what they'll actually say is "talk to Dave at the back counter," but Dave will say "That's a Niven story, first printed in '73, currently collected in Limits, which we have used." Or whatever.
Anyway, OCoH (like many indie bookstores) has a Store Cat. Her name is Shagrat, after the orc who commands Cirith Ungol and captures Frodo at the end of book 4. She's gray and fuzzy and not at all like an orc; she curls up on the Sandman graphic novels or in the front window and is completely pettable. And she's been through a lot -- she's survived cancer and massive surgery after a hit-and-run and all sorts of things. But she just got diagnosed with inoperable malignant carcinoma. And so they took her back "home," to the store, and put to sleep. *sniffles* Goodbye, Shagrat.
And one of the only places in the Bay Area where you can walk in and say "okay, look, I read this short story when I was a kid, in a collection designed for kids with a pink elephant on the cover, and it was about this evil alien that's telepathic and disappeared when people didn't believe in it." And they'll say ... well, what they'll actually say is "talk to Dave at the back counter," but Dave will say "That's a Niven story, first printed in '73, currently collected in Limits, which we have used." Or whatever.
Anyway, OCoH (like many indie bookstores) has a Store Cat. Her name is Shagrat, after the orc who commands Cirith Ungol and captures Frodo at the end of book 4. She's gray and fuzzy and not at all like an orc; she curls up on the Sandman graphic novels or in the front window and is completely pettable. And she's been through a lot -- she's survived cancer and massive surgery after a hit-and-run and all sorts of things. But she just got diagnosed with inoperable malignant carcinoma. And so they took her back "home," to the store, and put to sleep. *sniffles* Goodbye, Shagrat.
