End of an era for Avenue Victor Hugo Books
For nearly three decades, Avenue Victor Hugo Books was a mainstay of the Boston bookstore scene at its storied spot on Newbury Street. It carried a shifting trove of 150,000 used books. In 2016, owner Vince McCaffrey, who got his start selling books from a pushcart on the streets of Boston, moved the bookshop to a 250-year-old post-and-beam barn in Lee, N.H. For the last long stretch, the shop has offered something that algorithms and online shopping couldn’t: serendipity, the magic of coming across something you weren’t looking for, that you didn’t expect, that ends up being the perfect thing, the right book for the right moment. In a poignant statement, McCaffrey recently announced he’ll be closing Avenue Victor Hugo Books. Business has been strong, but the physical demands of selling books to the public asks more than he can give. For a man who brought this store back to life more than once, this final closure “is all a bit traumatic for me.” The store will be open through the end of October, and will be running a sale through its closure. McCaffrey will sell books online, but the in-person phase of the store is reaching its end. McCaffrey expressed his gratitude to the halfcentury worth of customers, from his pushcart days to now, saying they’ve made him “happier than I have a right to be.” For more information, visit avenuevictorhugobooks.com.
New poetry collection examines the nexus of money, power, and science
“We are not the center of the universe./ Truth is the testimony of sense./ Heaven and matter the same sentence./ Atoms and nothingness and nothing else.” So writes poet and BU professor Kevin Gallagher in his latest collection of poetry, “And Yet It Moves” (MadHat). The series of sonnets centers on Galileo and the way the Catholic Church charged him with heresy for claiming the earth moves around the sun, going against the tenets of scripture. Gallagher brings the Medicis into it, Fra Angelico, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Petrarch, John Milton, showing the knots between power, money, and the making of art, and the thwarting of progress. He spotlights the absurdity of extreme wealth (“Leo’s banquets served peacock tongue”) and backward-looking brutality (a hanged man “swung/ like a pendulum leaving his time”). Gallagher’s 2016 collection of poetry, “Loom,” examined racial justice in antebellum Boston in an exploration of power, money, and abolitionism. “And Yet It Moves” is a nuanced and powerful comment on the grim state of money and power’s place in the right-now denial of science we’ve seen in relation to the pandemic and the climate on the earth. “The same God that gives us sense and reason/ didn’t intend for us to forego their use.”
Aug. 19 is Bookstore Romance Day
The fifth annual Bookstore Romance Day is coming up this Saturday, August 19. Across the country, independent bookstores will be celebrating romance fiction, its readers, and its authors. At Whitelam Books in Reading, customers who buy a romance book will go home with a rose and a love poem. Other participating bookstores around the state include All She Wrote Books in Somerville; the Silver Unicorn Bookstore in Acton; Titcomb’s in East Sandwich; Harvard Bookstore; the Brookline Booksmith; Belmont Books; Lala Books in Lowell; Odyssey Bookshop in South Hadley; and others. For more information and a complete list, visit bookstoreromanceday.org.
Coming out
“Dark Days” by Roger Reeves (Graywolf ) “Thin Skin” by Jess Shapland (Pantheon) “August Wilson: A Life” by Patti Hartigan (Simon & Schuster)
Pick of the week
Michael Herrmann at Gibson’s Bookstore in Gibson, N.H., recommends “Monster: A Fan’s Dilemma” (Knopf ): “This book had its beginnings as an essay in the ‘Paris Review’ that went viral — ‘What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?’ Claire Dederer has expanded her essay into a broad and fascinating study of the issue, and also a radical self-examination that is highly valuable. You’ll read about Picasso, Woody Allen, Miles Davis, Michael Jackson, and many other wellknown figures whose work endures even as their reputations are reevaluated.”