Lampblack & Lye

Lampblack & Lye was opened, on the rainy afternoon of October the seventeenth, 1996, by Mr. Elias Croft, then a man of forty-one, lately a department-store clerk, and now — by the simple expedient of having signed a five-year lease on a sixteen-hundred-square-foot ground-floor shop on lower Congress Street — a bookseller. The opening inventory, drawn principally from Mr. Croft's own collection & from boxes purchased at three estate sales over the preceding summer, ran to approximately eleven thousand titles, weighted heavily toward American literature, the natural history of New England, and what Mr. Croft has since described, with some accuracy, as "the kind of poetry one does not read on aeroplanes."

The shop has, in the thirty years since, grown to roughly thirty-eight thousand titles; lost two of three exterior walls to a fire in 2008 & been rebuilt to the original plan; been joined by Ms. Aleta Persaud, who became Mr. Croft's partner in the business in 2014, and who now runs the day-to-day with the same dignified obstinacy he brought to it; and survived two recessions, a pandemic, and the steady, twenty-five-year decline of the American bookshop in general. We are very glad to have survived. We are gladder still to be where we are, doing what we are doing.

We carry new books & used; we carry maps, broadsides, and a small selection of antiquarian ephemera; we host readings on Thursday evenings most weeks of the year, run a quarterly literary subscription, & sell a small line of paper goods printed two blocks away. We do not carry stationery, or coffee, or sundry gift items of any kind. The shop is not a lifestyle brand & would, in all honesty, make a poor one. We are open seven days a week, and we are very pleased indeed to have you.

The current shop occupies sixteen-hundred & ten square feet of ground-floor frontage on lower Congress Street, a half mile inland from the working waterfront, in a four-storey brick building that has been, in various incarnations, a chandler's office, a notary's premises, a quilting cooperative, and — most improbably — a midcentury luncheonette specialising in haddock chowder. The bookshop took over the ground floor in 1996 and has not moved since. The building's upper floors are private residences; one of them, since 2019, is Ms. Persaud's.

Current stock runs to approximately thirty-eight thousand titles — roughly one-third new, two-thirds used. The used books are not a remainder operation; we buy carefully, almost entirely from local sources, and we price what we sell at what we consider fair, which is to say roughly half the new equivalent for ordinary trade-paperback fiction, & somewhat more for first editions, signed copies, and books that nobody at all is reprinting. Of the new books, we stock with a noticeable preference for serious fiction, the natural history of New England, working-class New England poetry, & books published by small & university presses. We do not carry mass-market romance, self-help, business titles, or — at considerable cost to our revenue — political & celebrity memoirs of the day.

The shop is staffed seven days a week by some combination of Mr. Croft (most mornings, all of Tuesday), Ms. Persaud (afternoons, evenings, and the entirety of Saturday), Mr. Devon Khoury (used books, antiquarian, since 2018), & Ms. Sophie Lindstrom (events, new fiction, since 2022). At least one of us is in the shop at all opening hours; usually two; on Saturdays, all four.

Of the thirty-eight thousand titles we carry, no four of us will agree on the same recommendation in any given month, and we have stopped pretending we will. What follows is the actual list of six books the four members of staff are personally pressing on customers this month, with our own annotations attached. We will gladly retrieve any of them from the shelf for you on your next visit.

ANNIE DILLARD · PILGRIM

Elias is recommending —

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Annie Dillard · Harper Perennial reissue, 2024

"I have probably sold a hundred and fifty copies of this book in thirty years & never grown the least bit tired of it. The current Harper Perennial reissue is the nicest edition I have seen. Dillard at her most attentive."

$18.00 · new · or $9 used (some foxing)

URSULA K. LE GUIN · LATHE

Aleta is recommending —

The Lathe of Heaven

Ursula K. Le Guin · Library of America ed.

"I have lost track of how many times I have reread this. The new Library of America edition is the right one to own — but the old Avon paperback (we have three behind the counter) is the right one to read in bed, which is what it is for."

$28.00 · LoA cloth · or $7 used (Avon)

MONIQUE ROFFEY · MERMAID

Devon is recommending —

The Mermaid of Black Conch

Monique Roffey · Knopf · pb edition

"Roffey's book won the Costa in 2020 and we have only the last two years caught up with it; a recasting of the mermaid story in a Caribbean village, written in a thrumming patois that takes a chapter to settle into & then will not let you leave for two days."

$17.00 · paperback · new only

JANE GARDAM · OLD FILTH

Sophie is recommending —

Old Filth

Jane Gardam · Europa Editions · 1st of trilogy

"I came to Gardam late, two years ago, and have since pressed Old Filth on everyone I am willing to bother. Buy it for an older relative who is bored of contemporary fiction; they will return for the next two volumes, which we will also have."

$17.00 · paperback · new only

JAMES WRIGHT · COLLECTED

Elias is also recommending —

Above the River · James Wright

Farrar, Straus & Giroux · collected poems

"The collected poems of one of the four or five American poets I have not been able to do without. The hardcover is now out of print — we have two clean used copies in stock at the moment, both first printings, and they will not last the month."

$34.00 · used · 1st printing

SARA PARETSKY · CRIME

Aleta is also recommending —

Indemnity Only

Sara Paretsky · Dell · the first V.I. Warshawski

"For when you want what you actually want, which is sometimes a crime novel about a private investigator in Chicago who is competent & angry about the right things. Forty years later, Paretsky still has not stopped writing them. Start at the start."

$10.00 · used · vg condition

The used-book side of the shop is, in dollar terms, our smaller line of business — about thirty-four percent of revenue in a typical year — & in temperamental terms, the part of the shop that requires the most attention & the most experience. The used-book inventory is curated by Mr. Khoury, who took over the responsibility from Mr. Croft in 2019, & who buys for the shop almost entirely from Portland-area private collections, library deaccessions, & the occasional invited estate sale.

We do not buy walk-in inventory at the counter. This is, we know, both unusual & somewhat irritating; if you have a box of books to part with, please send Mr. Khoury a brief email (used@lampblack-lye.com) describing what you have & how you came by it, & he will reply, usually within the week, with a yes or a no & a proposed arrangement for inspection. We pay in cash or in store credit at the same rate, with a slight premium on credit. We do not advertise this practice; we have far more inventory offered to us than we can take, & we accept perhaps one in five offers.

What we are most interested in receiving, at any time: 20th-century American literary fiction in good condition, natural history of New England in any reasonable condition, poetry collected editions of any period, & regional history of Portland, Maine, & the New England maritime trades. What we are almost never able to use: hardcover textbooks, post-2010 paperback fiction, mass-market romance, any Reader's Digest condensation, & encyclopaedia sets in any condition.

We host readings & literary events most Thursday evenings of the year. These are free, unticketed, & usually attended by between twenty & sixty people; the shop seats roughly forty comfortably & can compress to fifty-five for a popular author. The events programme is curated by Ms. Lindstrom; we typically schedule a season three months in advance & announce additions by email. A selection of what is currently on the calendar:

The shop is at 284 Congress Street, Portland, Maine, on the lower (inland) end of Congress Street, between Brackett & Pine, on the ground floor of a four-storey brick building with a green awning. The nearest cross street is Brackett; the nearest parking is a metered municipal lot two blocks toward the working waterfront. Bus routes 8 & 4 both stop on Congress at Brackett. We are fully accessible by ground-floor entry, with a step-free path from the sidewalk; the children's section, in the back, is reached by a half-step that we will gladly attend to a ramp for if you call ahead.

There is a dog. Her name is Junípero, she is nine, she is a small grey lurcher of indeterminate parentage who came to us by way of a customer's farm in Cumberland, & she is almost always in the front of the shop on the small bed by the door. She is allergic to no part of the human experience & will happily be patted. She is not, despite many requests, available for adoption. There are two chairs by the window; they are intended for reading, and you are welcome to sit in them for as long as your legs hold up. We do not, in either chair, consider you obliged to buy anything.

We write a monthly letter, by email, of approximately fifteen hundred words. It is composed in turn by each of the four members of staff, & consists of: a brief account of what is happening at the shop, three or four short staff picks for the coming month, the calendar of events, & — almost always — a longer piece of writing by one of us on a book, an author, a question of bookselling, or a particular peculiarity of the trade. It is the only thing we ask for your email address for. We do not sell it, share it, or use it for anything else; you may unsubscribe at any time, in one click, & we will not be hurt.