A hearty congratulations to Savannah Quinlan, the winner of our 2025 Essay contest, and to Gavin Laur, the runner-up! Both had outstanding essays advocating for a title or author we should carry in the store; Savannah argued for the us carrying Tumble & Blue, while Gavin wrote a convincing case for the books of John Flanagan, most famous for his Ranger's Apprentice series. We had a strong submission to this contest all around this year, so a heartfelt thank you to every young person who took the time write something about a book they loved. Every essay was a joy to read.
We held a small get-together at the bookstore this past Saturday to which every participant was invited, where we played the "guess who is on the card on your forehead" game (literary edition), had each participant read their essay, and had snacks!
Canterbury Book Store will be closed tomorrow, May 23, for a holy day observance
Hello Canterbury patrons! Just a quick note that the Canterbury Book Store will be closed tomorrow, May 23, in observance of the Bahá’í holy day of the Declaration of the Báb.
We will also be closed May 26th in observance of Memorial Day.
A quick note for those wondering, we’ve been reading through all the essay contest submissions the past few days, and I think we’re getting close to choosing a winner! More details coming soon!
The 2025 Canterbury Book Store Essay Contest!
‘The Architect’s Dream’ by Thomas Cole
Dear younger readers,
Thanks to the generosity of my aunt June, the Canterbury Book Store is again hosting an essay contest, and accepting submissions from readers in the age range of 8 to 17 years old; the essay should be on the topic “What specific book(s) should the Canterbury carry in its store?” That is to say, you should try and make the case for why we should have one of your favorite books on our store’s shelves'; anything from Llama Llama Red Pajama to Laurence Stern’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy. If you prefer, you could also argue for us carrying a series of books, or a specific author’s entire body of work.
The winner of the essay contest will win $50 in cash and a $50 gift certificate to the Canterbury Book Store. The essays will be jointly judged by Jesse and Rebecca, so feel free to try and tailor your argument to our sensibilities. The prize money was donated by June McCall, a schoolteacher, educator, and promoter of reading everywhere! (And also the aunt of Jesse!)
There are no strict requirements as to format and length of the essay, beyond that it should have your name and contact information (phone number/email) somewhere on it. The essay should be long enough to contain a fully-developed argument, and no longer; if you would find more specific (but arbitrary!) guidance helpful, let’s say roughly 300 words long. You are welcome to be more conversational in tone; do not feel obligated to maintain a strictly formal style.
The submission deadline is April 30, 2025. Essays can be dropped off in person at the Canterbury Book Store, mailed to us, or contact us via our Contact Us Page and we can get you set up with a digital submission.
Good luck!
Rebecca Bender and Jesse Traub
Canterbury Book Store
How big is Jorge Louis Borges's Library of Babel?
A sketch by Erik Desmazières
I’ve been reading my way through a collection of Jorge Louis Borges’s short stories, and enjoying myself immensely. Even in translation, his writing is so full of wit and delightful turns of phrase; the stories and themes are weird and maddening without ever descending into grotesqueries. One story in particular has captured my imagination: The Library of Babel. I’m certainly not the only one fascinated by the concept, if all the allusions to it I keep running across are any indication (including the homage at https://libraryofbabel.info/). The premise of the story is this: the first-person narrator of the story is a denizen of a vast library world composed of hexagonal cells, or perhaps more aptly, hexagonal galleries. The creation of some mad god, these cells extend seemingly without limits in whatever direction you walk, whether through the corridors that connect adjacent rooms together, or up and down the staircases that allow access to other floors: an unending sheet of hexagons, hexagons stacked one on top of the other.
In each hexagonal cell, there are 20 bookshelves; on each shelf, 32 books; each book contains 410 pages; every page 40 lines; every line 80 characters, of which there are 25 possible (23 upper-case letters, a space, a comma, and a period). The librarians (for there is no other profession) of the Library theorize that it contains every possible permutation of book you could make using those 25 characters. Their evidence is that nearly every book is complete and utter nonsense; a random collection of letters and punctuation devoid of meaning, as most permutations would be. Finding one actual word would be a triumph; some librarians search their whole lives for the book that foretells their fate or contains their salvation – if all possible combinations are present, then certainly such a book exists.
Borges display his characteristic genius here, taking the idea often also expressed in the cliche “a thousand monkeys typing randomly on typewriters would eventually produce the works of Shakespeare,” and enlivening it with imagination, weirdness, and what it would mean to live with such a wonder. It would be terrible. Even if such jewels as the plays of Shakespeare, the poems of Attar, Ferdowsi, and Rumi, the novels of Chinua Achebe exist in this library, they are drowned and lost in a sea of gibberish. Nothing of meaning can ever be found in such a place.
But I was curious: the narrator did say that some librarians argued that while large, the Library was finite, being only large enough to contain all possible books. How large would such a library actually be? First, how many permutations of book are there? Given the description above, we can calculate each book contains roughly 1,312,000 characters; each of those some odd-million characters could be one of 25 possible symbols. This gives us the combinatorial 25^1,312,000 different possible books. This is an impossibly large number. Neither I, nor you, nor any creature can fathom a fraction of such a count. But let’s continue anyway!
The size of each hexagonal cell requires a bit of inference and guesswork; the narrator relates that each gallery is a little taller than the height of the average librarian – let’s call that 2 meters. If we give a generous length of 4 meters to a side of the hexagon, that gives us a volume of roughly 83 cubic meters . Each hexagon contains 640 books, so all we have to do is divide the (impossibly large) number of possible books by 640, and then multiply that number by 83 cubic meters to get the total volume of the Library of Babel.
Because I’m conventional, I want to convert my number of books to a base 10 exponential expression; I’m fuzzy on my logarithmic functions, but I think 25^1,312,000 is the same value as 10^1,836,800. Dividing that number by 640, and then multiplying by 83, gives us the volume of the Library: 10^1,836,799 cubic meters! Here we encounter the first sense of alienation by large numbers: intellectually, I know that number is a tenth, a whole order of magnitude!, smaller than the initial number of combinations. I can express this mathematically. But it doesn’t seem to have really moved how that number appears in my brain. It’s about to get worse.
Just how big is, to finally write the exponent as a superscript, 10^1,836,799 cubic meters [editors note - Squarespace formatting doesn’t allow superscripts, lol] ? Well, let’s compare it the biggest things I can think of: the universe. A common estimation of the diameter of the visible universe is 93 billion light years. I want to take a moment to emphasize how unfathomably large that is. Doing some simple math, the only kind I know, we can thus calculate that the visible universe is approximately 3.5×10^80 cubic meters in volume. It suddenly becomes very apparent that this isn’t a question of how many Libraries of Babel could you fit in the universe, it’s a question of how many universes could you fit in the Library of Babel. The answer is, you could fit approximately 10^1,836,719 visible universes in the Library of Babel.
This is monstrous. The biggest thing I can think of, the universe, something so big I have no hope of comprehending it, is itself multiplied by an unfathomably large number. Again, despite being reduced by 80 orders of magnitude, by the size of our universe, our original combinatorial number remains seemingly unreduced to my eyes.
To add yet one more absurdity to this exercise, even shrinking each hexagon of the library down to a cubic angstrom (an angstrom being approximately the diameter of an atom), and thus each book to sub-atomic size, has no discernable impact on our numbers. For such a tiny-celled Library of Babel would still occupy 10^1,836,767 m3, or 10^1,836,686 visible universes.
Did Borges know just how large he was making his hypothetical Library of Babel? He read widely, and from what little of his personality I can glean from the types of stories he writes, he might have delighted in working through such a mathematical exercise as ours.
I leave you with one last enormity to consider. In contrast to many of his fellow librarians, or narrator theorizes that if a librarian were to somehow reach the bounds of the Library of Babel, they would simply, unknowingly step into another Library of Babel, a repeat of the first, but one of many adjoining it, themselves adjoined by numerous other Libraries of Babel, and so on and so on, like cells in honeycomb.
Richard Smith's 'Understanding Michigan Black Bear' got a TV Spot
Marquette author Richard Smith was recently featured on an episode of ‘Discovering the UP’, where they talked about the third edition of his ‘Understanding Michigan Black Bear’ (which we carry!). See the spot at this link here!
Review: 'Grown Women' by Sarai Johnson
I recently had the pleasure of reading Sarai Johnson’s debut novel, Grown Women. Set across rural Tennessee and Washington, D.C. from the 1970s to the present day, the novel follows four Black women – great-grandmother Evelyn, grandmother Charlotte, mother Corinna, and daughter Camille – and how the relationships between them change as they themselves do. More specifically, it examines how each mother messes up raising her daughter, and how they pin their hopes of redemption on the success of young Camille. Johnson succeeds in that magic possessed only by great writers: of writing a story true to the specific life its characters, characters who might be very different from you, who you nevertheless see parts of yourself in. The four women at the heart of the novel themselves go through this: despite being blood-relations, they could scarcely have a more varied set of personalities and outlooks, but you get to share in their joy and small triumphs as they find paths to understanding and empathizing with each other. Johnson’s prose underlines these differences among its characters, not just in dialogue but also in the composition of entire chapters, each of which is told from the third-person perspective of one of the four.
Grown Women handles the depiction of trauma better than most other works, even works I otherwise like. It is not a novel that revels in the misery of its characters. Their problems are neither self-invented in the way that many introspective novels frustratingly fall into, nor are they so extreme and unlikely as to descend into bathos and unintentional comedy. Every bad decision a character makes is understandable in light of what we know about them, or learn about them later. Fundamentally, Grown Women treats its characters with real love and affection. It never overlooks their faults, but understands that they can change, improve, forgive, and be worthy of forgiveness; in short, it believes that people can grow. That is an important message, and one the novel delivers beautifully. In the most unforced way, the novel touches on numerous other themes that time and space do not permit me to recount. I will simply say that Grown Women is worth your time, if for no other reason than that you will have such a good time reading it.
Congrats to Perry Randall, the winner of our 2024 essay contest
The winner of our essay contest, Perry, receiving her prize.
Many congratulations to Perry Randall, the winner of the 2024 Canterbury Book Store Essay Contest with her persuasive argument on why we should carry Tui T. Sutherland’s Wings of Fire series. See below for a reproduction of her essay in full; rest assured, we will indeed be stocking this series. Special thanks to my aunt June, who not only sponsored the contest but also acted as judge and pored over each essay. She said she had a difficult time choosing the winner as all the entrants this year had strong and convincing submissions! My personal thanks to all the children who sent in a submission - it was a pleasure to read your essays and share in your joy of reading.
And now, the winning essay:
Wings of Fire Books
by Perry Randall
I think the specific series of books the Canterbury Book Store should carry in its store is the Wings of Fire book series. They are a kids fantasy fiction series about dragon prophecies and saving friends. The author is Tui T. Sutherland and the series is a New York Times bestseller. There are 16 books but you should at least carry the first 5 of this series. In this series the main characters are dragons, and humans are called “scavengers” and they are used for pets or food for the dragons. I love these books because they have adventures like, for instance, the good dragons fly across the Sandwing, Seawing, and Icewing territories to stop a war (these are different types of dragons) and make peace.
I like the author’s descriptions of how the different kinds of dragons look. For instance my favorite type is a Skywing because they are protective, strong, and pretty. My favorite characters in this series are Mono, Quibli, Cliff, and Peril. Of these, Cliff is the best. He is a Skywing dragonett, which is a little dragon less than ten years old. He is a funny character that loves to sing songs. He is also the prince of the Skywings. The chapters are written in a way that makes me feel excited and curious about what will happen next. I don’t want to stop reading once I start. The book I’m reading now (#14) is 316 pages, but it will only take about four days to finish it. I think the age of kids that will like these books are from 7 to 13. These books are very popular at my school library. I know kids will like to buy them if they are at the Canterbury Book Store.
Yes, People Still Read Books
A complaint (statement? accusation?) I hear from people who come into the Canterbury is that people don’t read anymore or that people don’t buy books anymore. Beyond the irony of making such a claim in a bookstore (and the double-irony that most of those people then proceed to leave the store without having purchased a book), it is also a statement that I don’t think has much merit.
During the court hearings for determining if Random House’s purchase of Simon & Schuster would create an unacceptable level of market concentration, executives from Random House tried to give evidence that the purchase was necessary to combat decreasing levels of readership, presenting some well-picked, arresting statistics to support their claim.
Well, Lincoln Michel wrote an article (https://countercraft.substack.com/p/yes-people-do-buy-books) examining the statistics they presented, and with some further statistics as his counter argument, gave a convincing riposte that people are purchasing just as many books as they always have, going back decades. And granted, perhaps I only find Michel’s argument convincing because it’s the one I want to believe to be true. But if that’s the case, why do some who walk into my store want to believe the opposite?
BECAUSE THEY’RE EVIL!!! Just kidding, that’s obviously not the case. Perhaps they feel left behind by the rate of change in the world and assume no value they hold dear has remained unaffected.
The 2024 Canterbury Book Store Essay Contest
Dear younger readers,
Thanks to the generosity of my aunt June, the Canterbury Book Store is again hosting an essay contest, and accepting submissions from readers in the age range of 8 to 17 years old; the essay should be on the topic “What specific book(s) should the Canterbury carry in its store?” That is to say, you should try and make the case for why we should have one of your favorite books on our store’s shelves'; anything from Eric Carle’s The Hungry Hungry Caterpillar to Joyce’s Ulysses. If you prefer, you could also argue for us carrying a series of books, or a specific author’s entire body of work.
The winner of the essay contest will win $50 in cash and a $50 gift certificate to the Canterbury Book Store. The essays will be jointly judged by Jesse Traub and Rebecca Bender, so feel free to try and tailor your argument to our sensibilities. The prize money was donated by June McCall, a schoolteacher, educator, and promoter of reading everywhere! (And also the aunt of Jesse!)
There are no strict requirements as to format and length of the essay, beyond that it should have your name and contact information (phone number/email) somewhere on it. The essay should be long enough to contain a fully-developed argument, and no longer; if you would find more specific (but arbitrary!) guidance helpful, let’s say roughly 300 words long. You are welcome to be more conversational in tone; do not feel obligated to maintain a strictly formal style.
The submission deadline is April 30, 2024. Essays can be dropped off in person at the Canterbury Book Store, mailed to us, or contact us via our Contact Us Page and we can get you set up with a digital submission.
Good luck!
Rebecca Bender and Jesse Traub
Canterbury Book Store
'Twas a Dulmas
Wishing you all a perfectly adequate Dulmas this season, whenever it happens for you and yours. Consume some mild food and some milder “entertainment”.
Reading from printed materials better than reading from screens, bookstore declares
The Guardian recently ran an article (https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/17/kids-reading-better-paper-vs-screen) covering a research study examining qualitative differences in brain-patterns in a group of ~60 middle-schoolers reading a text either on paper or on a screen. For entirely self-interested reasons, we thought this subject worth posting about.
However, the Guardian article extrapolates much further from the experiment than the researchers themselves do; the full-preprint research paper can be read here:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.08.30.553693v1.full
Specifically, I think the second paragraph of their conclusion is worth reading:
"For reasons related to study delimitations and limitations we think it too early to generate a set of recommendations for adaptation in the classroom. However, we do think that these study outcomes warrant adding our voices to those of Delgado et al. [2] in suggesting that we should not yet throw away printed books, since we were able to observe in our participant sample an advantage for depth of processing when reading from print. Applications for digital reading should not be dismissed, either: the observation of a potential print advantage does not negate the value of rapid access to information that could be supported by digital reading. It may be that classroom practices should strategically match reading strategies and mediums to task, such that printed media are employed when deeper processing is required while digital access to text is utilized for other needs."
Holiday Time Closures and Openings!
Just a notice that we’ll be closed Sunday, Dec. 24th and Monday Dec. 25th for it being a Sunday and Christmas Day, respectively. We will, however, be open Saturday, Dec. 23rd, and Tuesday Dec. 26th through the rest of the week for our regular hours.
We will be closed Dec. 31st because, it is, again, a Sunday, as well as Monday, Jan. 1st because of New Years Day, but then should be open for our regular hours and days the rest of that week.
I hope you all get to enjoy some time off!
Last day for special orders to arrive by Christmas - Friday, Dec. 8th
If you would like a special order in before the 25th of December, be sure to get it requested by noon on Friday, Dec. 8th! As long as the title is in stock at the publisher's shipping warehouse, we should be able to get it in before Christmas. If it turns out you need a last minute gift after that time, we plan on having plenty of good books in stock leading up to Christmas! (Although we will be closed Christmas day).
Closed today starting at noon, and closed all day tomorrow (Sat. Sept. 30th) - Another Wedding!
We have yet another wedding to attend this weekend in a far-flung place, so we’ll be closing early today (Friday, Sept. 29th) at noon, and we’ll be closed all day tomorrow (Saturday, Sept. 30th) as we attend that. Depending on travel, we may even be closed Monday, Oct. 1st, but we will most certainly be open for our regular hours again on Tuesday, Oct. 2nd!
We'll be closing early today, Sept. 22, and might be closed all tomorrow, Sept. 23
We’ll be closing early today, sometime around 3pm, so that we can attend a friend’s wedding! Depending on staffing, we might also be closed all of tomorrow, Sept. 23 - I’ll try and update this post when I know for sure.
UPDATE — We’ll be open our regular hours tomorrow, Saturday Sept. 23!
Wow, we've found a lotta bottles underneath our building
Just some of the bottles we’ve found in the dirt surrounding our foundation
As Rebecca nears the end of shoring up our building’s foundation, I’d just like to point out the initial trickle of old bottles we found in the soil surrounding our buildings foundation turned into a deluge. And these are just the complete ones; I’d say the soil underneath our building is like 10% glass shards.That’s what we get for this building being a saloon 100 years ago.
We also found this interesting ornamental metal dealie!
And this incredible rusted metal spring (now with added sharp barbs)!
She's usually more friendly
Here’s my daughter, mean-mugging. I wouldn’t cross her, and neither should you.
You may have noticed a big hole next to our building - Foundation work!
Well, there’s your problem
Keen-eyed observers may have noticed a giant hole and pile of dirt next to our bookstore recently. Fear not! We meant for it to be there. The foundation our our building is more than 100 years old, and it needed a little work. After some debate, we concluded we weren’t interested in converting our bookstore into a Mystery Spot (although our daughter has had much fun placing balls on the floor and watching them roll into the northwest corner), so we contacted a contractor, and they are diligently excavating, pouring a new foundation, and stabilizing the whole building.
Fortunately it was not a pressing matter, so we were able to wait for an opportune moment to have the work started. Here’s to hoping the building remains standing for another hundred years! But I’ll settle for it making through these repairs.
We'll be closed Friday, April 21 and Tuesday, May 2 for Ridván!
Hello All! Just a quick note that the bookstore will be closed on Friday, April 21st and Tuesday, May 2nd in observance of two Baha’i Holy Days (the First and Twelfth Days of Ridvan, respectively). However, we will still be open on the rest of the days for our usual hours, so if you need a good book, stop by then!
Announcing the winner of our Essay Contest: Sawyer!
Today we are proudly announcing the winner of our essay contest: Sawyer! Sawyer wrote an essay on why we should carry the Hank the Cowdog series, which I’ve reproduced below. The picture above would have had a copy of the first book in that series as well, except we had already sold it within the day we had it in stock! So clearly, Sawyer has given us a great recommendation. Sawyer’s prize was $50 in cash and a $50 gift certificate to the store, generously sponsored by my aunt June. Now, on to his essay:
My name is Sawyer […], and I think you should carry the series Hank the Cowdog. First, I will tell you about the main character Hank. Hank is a dog that lives in the state of Texas. He is the one that tells the stories of his adventures. Hank calls himself “Head of Ranch Security” on his owner’s cattle ranch. He also thinks he has to bark the sun up every morning. He believes he is a “purebred top-of-the-line blue-ribbon cowdog”.
So now back to why I think you should carry this series in your bookstore. Here are three reasons why. The first reason is that they are pretty quick reads and all ages enjoy reading the series. My family laughs at the audio books when we listen to them.
Next, there is a lot of variety in the characters, both human and animal like Drover, Slim Chance, and Pete the barn cat. Hank’s sidekick is named Drover, a younger dog who also lives on the ranch. Drover is a small, stub-tailed, white dog who is actually a wimp and complains about his leg pain whenever it is time for action. But still a fun and lovable character. The next character I want to tell you about is Slim Chance. Slim works for Hank’s owner, High Loper, (the owner of the ranch). Slim is funny because he is a bachelor and has a very messy house. Both Hank and Drover have had many adventures with Slim. The last character I will talk bout is Pete the barn cat. Pete is notorious for getting Hank and Drover in trouble with Sally May (Loper’s wife). Pete likes to get the dogs in trouble for his entertainment, for example, the time he tricked the dogs into jumping over the fence into the yard where Sally May doesn’t want them. These are just my favorite characters, there are many more in the stories like the coyote brothers Rip and Snort and JT Cluck the rooster.
And last but not least, the books are also available on audiobook so people can listen to them while working or relaxing. The author reads the books with different voices for each character. There are sound effects, music, and singing. I have included a list of Hank the Cowdog books and two Youtube videos you can listen to the author read aloud a part of his books.
“The Boxer”; Hank the Cowdog Youtube channel
Thank you for taking the time to read my essay on Hank the Cowdog. I hope to see those books in your bookstore soon, especially the audiobooks. I’ve also included a list of all the Hank the Cowdog books and audiobooks. Also included is a map of the ranch Hank lives on and two coloring sheets to show you what the characters look like.
