Wild & Homeless Books

17/04/2025

We don't post on here much these days (we're on Instagram more often), but this is great

A small Michigan community banded together to help a beloved local bookstore move its stock to a new storefront

21/02/2024

If booksellering proves unfeasible today, we'll do Thursday instead this week.

For those of you unfamiliar with the shop, it's not that we only open in good weather, but the shop (downstairs at least) is so small that when the stock and the tables we use for outside display are packed up, it's virtually impossible to move in here.

Check before travelling. If we can find the phone we'll answer it.

15/02/2024

Thanks to we just about got a window display in for Valentines Day. Admittedly, it's a pre-20th century warfare display with a strong emphasis on Napoleon, but hey-ho as they liked to say on the retreat from Moscow

05/02/2024

I will mostly be spending time in the 1960s this week

18/09/2023

This fell out of a book today and sparked much Proustian reverie. For the uninitiated, it's a security tag, about the size of a £2 coin as used by Ottakar's bookshops back in the day. We were supposed to place tags in about 25% of stock, paying particular attention to higher priced books. The tags were deactivated at checkout, so in theory customers could then leave the store without triggering the security gates. Two particular memories spring to mind. Once, a dim-witted colleague managed to leave a box of tags on the deactivating device, rendering them all unusable. We didn't figure out what had happened for several weeks, during which time the tags could well have said "thank you for shoplifting at Ottakar's " for all the good they were doing. The second, more uplifting tale, concerns two booksellers with time on their hands on a slow, wet weekday afternoon, who decided to tag each and every book in the "Erotic Fiction" section. The erotic fiction was kept by the door to the shop, and as luck would have it, the security gates. The next few weeks provided much amusement for the till staff as the usual purchasers of such material attempted to shuffle up to the s**t section as unobtrusively as possible, only to trigger the audible alarms pretty much as soon as they took anything off the shelf. Our sales of erotic fiction did, however, take something of a nosedive.

15/09/2023

New window display. Books again, would you believe? No particular theme. The laziness of the long-suffering bookseller perhaps.

08/09/2023

So, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest. As it says in the Book of Common Prayer

06/09/2023

The shop is open, but I'm obviously not 100%. A customer left their hat and shopping trolley downstairs, and I asked it if it wanted any help because I thought it was a dwarf pensioner.

05/09/2023

Plan B

04/09/2023

Meh.

31/08/2023

25/08/2023

This is, apparently, a book of military reminiscence. The title put me more in mind of Oscar Wilde's forlorn battle with his wallpaper.