Uncle Hugo's Science Fiction Bookstore & Uncle Edgar's Mystery Bookstore

April 14, 2024
How’s Business?
By Don Blyly

The week of the 50th Anniversary Sale was “interesting”. For many years I heard the warnings about chest pains, and for many years I’ve had chest pains, but not quite like the medical advice described them. Often, the pain seemed to be between my ribs, more often on the left side, but I didn’t think the pains were accurately reporting on where the problem was located. And often I would let out a couple of large burps or farts and the chest pains would completely go away, so it seemed like the pains were not related to my heart.

On the Monday after the anniversary I had a different kind of chest pain, a kind of pressure in the center of my chest, and it did not go away (but became somewhat less) after a couple of belches, and I started worrying a bit. But Ecko had a doggie dental appointment Wednesday morning to have a tooth pulled that it had taken a month to set up, so I thought I’d get through that first if my pain didn’t get any worse. My chest pain stayed about the same through Wednesday, and Ecko got through the extraction and was ordered to only have soft food for 2 weeks. Thursday morning my chest pain was worse, so I went over with the staff of the store what to do if I had to go to the emergency room. Just before noon the order of new t-shirts and sweatshirts arrived, a couple of weeks earlier than expected, and I wrote the check to the shirt guy. Before I could start unpacking the 5 large cases of shirts, the pain became so bad that I decided to drive Ecko home, made arrangements for my son to pick her up at home after he got off work, and drove to the Abbott-Northwestern emergency room.

It seems that one of the arteries in my heart was 99% blocked, and they quickly put in a stent. The other arteries were partially blocked, but not enough to justify any more stents. Swallowing a fist full of pills every day for the rest of my life is supposed to clear the other arteries and prevent a repeat of the heart attack. After a couple of days they ran an echo-cardiogram to determine how much my heart had been damaged. The doctor who interpreted the results told me that my heart was functioning at 45-50%. I said that I didn’t feel that bad. She said that nobody’s heart functions at 100% according to the standard used for the test–a perfectly healthy heart functions at 55% on the test, and that I would be back to 55% within a couple of months. So, no permanent damage, but I’m supposed to take it easy for a while.

About 48 hours after the stent was installed I got out of the hospital, and about an hour later got to the store to see how things were going. A LOT of mail orders had come in while I was in the hospital, and Jon had pulled all the books and put them in piles so that I wouldn’t have to run all over the store finding them to process the orders. And a lot of boxes of new books had arrived. It took several days to get through all of that, and even longer to get through all the e-mails that had piled up. But for several days I mostly sat in front of the computer and didn’t even think about going to the basement.

The hospital has been dribbling out the bills to the insurance company, and the insurance company has been letting me know how much I’m responsible for. So far, the hospital has billed over $110,000, and so far I’m only responsible for $200.

Last week I finally got through all the boxes of T-shirts and sweatshirts that came in almost a month before, and the prices did not go up. A couple of shipments of Lyorn by Steven Brust arrived, and Steve dropped by briefly to sign a few so that I could start filling mail orders. We still have a lot of the 50th Anniversary mugs available. Lots of new bookshelves have been installed, including a Recommended Mystery display.

Independent Bookstore Day will be Saturday, April 27. This year there will be 28 bookstores in the Twin Cities area participating in the Bookstore Passport program. Customers can pick up a Passport at any of the participating stores starting on Wednesday, April 24 and get them stamped through Sunday, April 28. Every bookstore page that gets rubber stamped becomes a coupon for that store, valid May 1 through August 31. Last year, all the coupons were for a 20% discount for a one-time purchase, and I suspect the same will be true this year. Any customers who manage to collect stamps from all 28 bookstores in the 5 day period will become eligible for a grand prize of a $25 gift certificate from all 28 stores (a $700 value).

On Saturday, April 27 Steven Brust will be signing Lyorn from 1 to 2 pm and Patricia C. Wrede will be signing The Dark Lord’s Daughter from 3 to 4 pm. Lyorn is already available to be ordered through UncleHugo.com, and hopefully The Dark Lord’s Daughter and Ribbon Dance by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller (due early June) will soon also be available to order.

Next week construction will begin on the area around Hiawatha and Lake Street and will last into the fall. Lake Street will go from 2 lanes each direction to 1 lane each direction, and the ramps between Hiawatha and Lake will be closed at times, but the intersection of Hiawatha and 32nd Street will still be open, so construction should not make it difficult to get to the Uncles.

February 26, 2024
How’s Business?
By Don Blyly

Uncle Hugo’s opened for business on March 2, 1974, which makes this coming Saturday our 50th anniversary. Uncle Hugo's 50th Anniversary Sale is Friday, March 1, 2024 through Sunday, March 10, 2024, with an extra 10% off everything at Uncle Hugo's/Uncle Edgar's. If you have an Uncle Hugo's discount card, you get 20% off everything. With a $200.00 purchase, we'll throw in a free 50th anniversary mug (while supply lasts). The sale only applies to in-store purchases, not to mail orders.

A week ago I ordered a new batch of t-shirts and sweatshirts. They won’t arrive in time for the Anniversary Sale, but should arrive in mid to late March. I don’t know yet if the price will remain the same or if the price will have to go up.

Steve Miller, co-author of the Liaden Universe series, died suddenly and unexpectedly on February 20. His wife and co-author Sharon Lee e-mailed to ask if I still wanted to go forward with the signed copies of Ribbon Dance ( #26, expected early June) since Steve would not be able to sign them. I assured her that I still wanted to carry the signed copies, and I asked about other future books in the series. She says that there are 3 more novels under contract with Baen Books. She is about 30,000 words into the sequel to Ribbon Dance and has Extensive Notes on the book after that. She plans to write all the books under contract, but doesn’t yet know if she’ll get them turned in as soon as originally scheduled. Uncle Hugo’s still has signed first printings of the three previous books in the series, Trader’s Leap, Fair Trade, and Salvage Rights.

The carpenter is busy in the basement building all the rest of the bookshelves I can figure out how to fit onto the sales floor. They will probably be installed by the end of March.

Let me share with you a couple of recent examples of irritating aspects of the business.

#1: We have a credit card terminal at the checkout area, which is slightly connected to our point-of-sale computer (which means the pos computer tells the terminal how much to charge on the credit card, but the terminal never tells my computer what the credit card number is). At the end of the day my computer prints out a report on the day’s business, including the total of the credit card transactions. The next morning I come in and the terminal is supposed to have printed out a report of how many credit card transaction took place the day before and how much the processing company has sent to my bank account. I can then compare the terminal report to my computer’s report to make sure everything matches. On January 31, the terminal did not print out a report, and from then on it only printed out a daily report about every 3 or 4 days. Then it printed out a report for February 21 that showed that it had processed 4 charge transactions, but I had 5 signed credit card slips from February 21, and the total from the terminal report was off by about $40.00. I then went through all of my daily computer reports and compared them to the amounts the credit card company had deposited to my bank every day for January through February 22. Everything matched. Including on February 22, when the deposit matched what my computer report listed as credit card sales, not what the terminal report claimed. The terminal had also been doing other strange things over the previous few weeks, so I called tech support for the processing company to try to get multiple problems resolved. After about 5 minutes on hold, I was given the option of having a tech support person call me back as soon as one was available, and that I wouldn’t lose my place in line by doing that. That was about 2 pm last Wednesday, and I’m still waiting for the call back, and I’m glad I wasn’t calling about a problem that was keeping me from doing business.

#2: A customer that I had never done business with before ordered a $30.00 book through AbeBooks, and I sent it off to him. About a week later he sent me an e-mail saying that the book had a small ding on the top edge of the page block that was not mentioned in the description, and he enclosed a photo of the ding. He wanted me to refund part of the price for the ding or else he would return the book for a refund. I checked on what other people were charging for the same book and saw that even with the ding he was getting a good price, but I agreed to refund him $5.00 for the ding. He wrote back that I would have to refund at least $15 or he would return the book. I told him to return the book. The next day he started the AbeBooks process for returning the book. But the day after that he told AbeBooks that he had never received the book and that they should refund his full purchase price without having to return the book he had never received–the book that he had already sent me a photo of to try to get me to cut the price in half.

February 7, 2024
How’s Business?
By Don Blyly

It took a lot longer than I expected to get the 50th Anniversary mugs listed on the website (UncleHugo.com), but it is finally done. There is a box on the home page right under the hours that will take you to the place to order a mug, and there is also a spot to click at the bottom of the Major Stuff column on the left side of the home page. Normally I ship books by media mail, where the cost is the same for the entire country. The mugs can not go by media mail, so I will be shipping them by priority mail, which no longer charges the same rate for the entire country. The cost of shipping a mug varies from around $7 to around $12, depending on how far away you are from Minneapolis, and I will charge you whatever it costs me to send the mug to you. I normally stock 6 standard sizes of boxes for mail orders, plus sometime re-using publishers boxes for odd size shipments. One of my standard size boxes is the perfect size to hold 1 mug, but I’ll have to get creative to ship multiple mugs to the same address with enough packing material to keep the mugs from bumping into each other.

We are getting very low on t-shirts (no Uncle Hugo’s XL left and only 1 Uncle Hugo’s XXL left at the moment), so I will be ordering a lot of t-shirts and a small number of sweatshirts in about 10 days. We normally carry t-shirts in adult sizes small to XXL and sweatshirts in adult sizes medium to XXL. If you would like me to special order a different size for you, let me know with an e-mail to UncleHugo (at) aol.com. Sizes larger than XXL are more expensive, but I won’t know the cost until I place the order.

Not having feet of snow on the ground has convinced a lot of people to do their Spring cleaning early. We’ve had many carloads of used books arrive in the last 10 days or so, and I understand the same has been happening at Dream Haven. We have lots of good stuff that came in, and it’s been a challenge to find places to put it all.

In a related development, the lumber yard is supposed to drop off thousands of dollars in lumber tomorrow so that more shelves can be built everywhere that I can find room for more shelves. But it will probably take over a month to get all the new shelves build and installed,.

Months ago people started asking to reserve a signed copy of Lyorn: Vlad Taltos #17 by Steven Brust, which won’t be out until April. We have lots of copies on order, and when they arrive Steve will come over a sign a bunch of them so that I can start mailing out copies, and he will also have a formal signing at Uncle Hugo’s on the last Saturday in April. You can’t order them through the website yet, but probably in the next few days you will be able to.

For the last 20 years or so we have been offering signed copies of Liaden Universe books by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller. We have arranged to do the same for Ribbon Dance ( #26) when it comes out in June. But the farther in advance that we start accepting orders, the more credit cards expire before the book becomes available, and thus the longer it takes to fill the orders. So it will probably be a couple of months before start accepting orders

November 30, 2023
How’s Business?
By Don Blyly

Uncle Edgar’s 43rd Anniversary Sale runs Friday, December 1 through Sunday, December 10, giving people two weekends to take advantage of the sale. Almost everything (excludes discount cards and gift certificates) will be 10% off. If you have a discount card, you’ll get 20% off. The sale applies to in-store purchases, but not to mail orders.

Black Friday sales were down a little from last year, and Small Business Saturday sales were down lot from last year (although both were better than an average Friday and Saturday). But last year Black Friday and Small Business Saturday were during the Uncle Edgar’s Anniversary Sale, so I’m hoping that we’ll catch up this weekend. Jigsaw puzzle sales have been quite strong over the last week, and I hope to be able to get a restock order placed in the next week or so.

The roof was patched, and we’ve had no leaks since the roofers were here. We’ve also had no rain since the roofers were here. By next Spring we’ll see how good a job the roofers did.

A lot of people expressed interest in the special mugs for Uncle Hugo’s 50th anniversary in March, so I placed an order for 288 of the 15 ounce mugs about a week ago. The supplier of the mugs claimed on their website that the order would be shipped in 10 to 15 days, but I’ve never ordered mugs before and don’t know how much I can trust that estimate, and we’ve all seen problems with supply chains over the last couple of years. I’ve been surprised by the number of people who have said that they don’t want to wait until March to buy the mugs – they want to buy them in time for Christmas if the mugs are available that early. I’ll keep you posted on when they arrive.

We received a lot of signed copies of Patrick Rothfuss’ The Narrow Road Between Desires ($26.00, which is not the book we’ve all been waiting for but has been receiving very good comments) and Martha Wells’ System Collapse (Murderbot Diaries, $21.99). The Rothfuss is signed on the title page, and the Wells has a tipped-in signature sheet. Both can be ordered from our website or purchased in the store.

We’ve maintained the same price for mailing books via media mail in the U.S. for about 25 years, while the cost of postage and mailing supplies have gone up a lot. The post office will be raising rates again in mid-January, and we will almost certainly have to raise our rates at that time.

November 7, 2023
How’s Business?
By Don Blyly

A few weeks ago we had a bad hail storm, and immediately afterwards leaks developed in the roof at 3 widely distant locations. A recommended roofer came out and looked things over. He didn’t think that the leaks could be blamed on the hail. He said that he could send out a crew to do $5000 to $10,000 of patching, but he recommended a completely new roof at around $130,000. Knowing what weather can be like in November in Minnesota, I didn’t want to try a complete roof replacement at this time of year, and perhaps getting it half-done just before a blizzard, so I asked for a patch job. I’m still waiting for the roofers to show up.

A couple of weeks ago I received a big shipment of jigsaw puzzles, including a bunch we haven’t had before. I’ve also been building up the stock of books that I’ll be recommending as holiday presents. We also have a lot of sweatshirts on hand, but are starting to sell out of some of the colors and sizes of t-shirts. I don’t expect to order more shirts until next spring.

The last few weeks in-store business has really been down, especially during the week. But mail orders have been strong. If you want to see what we have listed on Abebook.com (currently over 16,000 titles, but no used mass market paperbacks), go to UncleHugo.com, click “Browse Our Merchandise”, then click “Browse our new books online”, then click “Search our used books at ABE Books” about 3/4 of the way down the page. A couple of warnings about searching on Abebooks.com: (1) they care about selling books, not about selling Uncle’s books, so they make it very easy to accidentally go from viewing our books to viewing books from hundreds of dealers around the world; (2) they supply the photos of the books and the cover shown may not match what we are actually selling, so ask us if that is important to you. We are now part way through mystery hardcovers by authors whose last name begin with “H”.

Lots of publishers try to get their best books out just before the holidays, knowing that this is when the most customers will be in the bookstores. Some of the more interesting books that have just arrived include:
Bookshops & Bonedust by Travis Baldree ($7.99), following Legends & Lattes
The Hexologists by Josiah Bancroft ($18.99), start of a new fantasy series by the author of the Selin Ascends series)
The Olympian Affair by Jim Butcher ($30.00), sequel to The Aeronauts Windlass after an 8 year wait
Defiance by C.J. Cherryh and Jane S. Fancher ($28.00)
Sword Catcher by Cassandra Clare ($30.00), the first of a very good adult fantasy series by an author primarily known for her young adult novels
An Inheritance of Magic by Benedict Jacka ($17.00), a book unrelated to his Alex Verus series
Murtagh by Christopher Paolini ($29.99), set in the world of Eragon
A Stroke of the Pen by Terry Pratchett ($30.00), foreword by Neil Gaiman, 20 short stories written under the name Patrick Kearns before he started writing novels
The Longmere Defense by Craig Johnson ($29.00)
The Last Devil to Die by Richard Osman ($29.00), fourth in the humorous Thursday Murder Club series
A Christmas Vanishing by Anne Perry ($22.00)
Proud Sorrows by James R. Benn ($27.95), Billy Boyle WW II mystery #18
and next week we should receive The Narrow Road Between Desires by Patrick Rothfuss ($26.00), and it is not the novel we have all be waiting for, but a side story

The Saturday after Thanksgiving everybody is urged to shop at their local small businesses. Some years this overlaps with our Uncle Edgar’s Anniversary Sale, some years it doesn’t, depending on the date for Thanksgiving. This year they will not overlap, but the Anniversary Sale will start the next weekend.

Uncle Hugo’s 50th Anniversary Sale will be next March, and I want to produce commemorative coffee mugs for the event, probably in the $12 to $15 price range, but I have no idea how many people will be interested, and I’ll have to place an order soon. If you are likely to be interested, drop me an e-mail. You won’t be committed, but I’d like to have enough to meet demand without having 100s of unsold items to fill my basement. Mugs will not be able to be shipped media mail, so shipping will be more than our normal $6.00 shipping charge.

September 28, 2023
How’s Business?
By Don Blyly

A last minute reminder of a couple of things:
1) Many people participated in the Twin Cities Independent Bookstore Passport program back in April, where you could get your passport book rubber stamped at various bookstores, and then get a 20% discount on a later purchase by bringing back your stamped passport. The deadline for getting your 20% discount is Saturday, September 30.
2) Sales tax will go up by 1% for the entire metro area on Sunday, October 1. I’m pretty sure I can figure out how to re-program our point-of-sales system to reflect the new, higher sales tax, but I’m not sure how long it will take to get the sales tax adjusted on our shopping basket.

We keep trying to get caught up with entering used hardcovers and trade paperback on Abebooks and putting them on the bookshelves, but every time we seem to be making significant progress, another couple of carloads of books come in. I had originally hoped to get all the used mystery hardcovers entered by the end of the summer. As of my last update, we had only gotten part way through Michael Connelly. We just got through entering Earlene Fowler, so we are still making some progress, but that still leaves a lot of the alphabet to get through. And the used bookshelves are getting very full.

July 7, 2023
How’s Business?
By Don Blyly

95% of the T-shirt and Sweatshirt Order Has Arrived
We had completely sold out of Uncle Hugo’s t-shirts in large and XL and were running very low on many other options, so I contacted the shirt printer, explained the problem, and asked when he thought we would be receiving our order. There are still some supply chain problems, so he had not yet received the blank shirts for special orders and for a few of the regular sizes, but he brought over yesterday everything that was already printed–which was over 95% of the total order. He will bring over the rest of the shirts after they all arrive and get printed, along with the invoice. I’ve restocked the shelves with almost everything, but the printer told me that the prices will be going up a bit on this order, so I will have to increase the retail price. But I won’t know how much the retail price will go up until I get the final invoice in perhaps 2 or 3 weeks. So the price on the new shirts will stay the same until I get the final invoice–giving customers a chance to save a little money if they purchase shirts in the next couple of weeks. My guess is that the price will go up by about $1.00 to $1.50 per shirt, but I won’t know for sure until I get the invoice.

The signed copies of Salvage Right by Sharon Lee & Steve Miller arrived, and I’ve shipped out over 140 copies of it so far, but still have a lot of copies available for either mail order or to pick up in the store.

I had hoped that we would get all of the used mystery hardcovers run through the computer and put on the shelves by the end of the summer, but we have been receiving so many fresh used books (both by purchasing them and having them donated) that it is taking longer than expected to get through the used mystery hardcovers stored in the basement. This is partly because the used science fiction and fantasy books have been selling so much faster than the used mystery books that we have been spending about 2/3 of our computer entry time going through the fresh science fiction and fantasy titles and only about 1/3 of our time hauling mystery hardcovers up from the basement. Going through the books alphabetically by author, we are now most of the way through Michael Connelly–so we obviously won’t get through the rest of the alphabet by the end of the summer.

T-shirts and Sweatshirts about to be re-ordered

A customer placed a mail order for a couple of shirts, which at first I couldn’t find. But enough in-store customers had gone through the display and then tossed the shirts they didn’t want all over the place instead of putting things back where they had picked them up, that the display was a mess (even though we try to straighten things out about once a week). I took apart the entire display, did an inventory of everything we had on the shelf and in boxes in the office, and managed to find one of the two shirts the customer wanted (a small Uncle Edgar’s t-shirt had been hidden under a pile of XXL Uncle Hugo’s t-shirts). I also found that we needed enough other shirts to be able to place a minimum order. (Minimum order is 250 shirts, which works out to between $4000 and $5000 wholesale, depending on how many are t-shirts and how many are sweatshirts.) It turns out that we needed enough shirts to be able to place the minimum order. I’m going to wait a week before I place the order, so if you want to order a size that we don’t ordinarily carry, let me know in the next week at [email protected] what you are interested in ordering. (We normally carry t-shirts in adult small through XXL and sweatshirts in adult medium through XXL.)

Don Blyly

May 27, 2023
How’s Business?
By Don Blyly

The Uncles will be closed on Memorial Day so that employees can have the day off and so I can work on taxes and filling out a workers compensation insurance audit form.

The rebuilt Minnehaha Post Office next door to the Uncles is supposed to open the day after Memorial Day. This will be helpful in many ways, but the post office has inadequate parking for customers and does not have off-street parking for their employees, so all the local businesses are concerned about what this will do to the supply of on-street parking for the customers of other businesses.

I just received an e-mail from Sharon Lee that Salvage Right has arrived in Maine for her and Steve Miller to sign over the weekend and then forward to Uncle Hugo’s sometime next week. I’ve been keeping the mail orders piled up in the order they were received, but I better alphabetizing them by the customers’ names so that I can spot who has order the book more than once.

So far we’ve run the used hardcover mysteries through the computer and put them on the shelves for anthologies and authors with last names starting with A or B and will start on C authors this weekend. The authors with names through R are sorted in the basement and waiting their turn to come upstairs and be run through the computer.

Minneapolis has this thing they call “Open Streets” where they close a major street to motor vehicles for a Saturday so that pedestrians and bicycles can wander up and down the street. This summer the only “Open Street” that will affect the Uncles will be Saturday, June 10, when Lake Street will be closed from 2nd Avenue (I-35-W) to 22nd Avenue (east side of the YWCA). If you would normally use Lake Street to approach the Uncles from the west, you’ll be able to use either 31st Street to 22nd Avenue or 28th Street to Hiawatha Avenue, but both will be much more crowded than normal.

April 23, 2023
How’s Business?
by Don Blyly

Saturday, April 29 is the 10th annual Independent Bookstore Day, when people are urged to get out to support their local independent bookstores. In the Twin Cities 23 independent bookstores (including Uncle Hugo’s/Uncle Edgar’s) will be participating in a Twin Cities Independent Bookstores Passport promotion. On Saturday you can go to any of the participating bookstores and pick up a Bookstore Passport and have that bookstore rubber stamp their page, which will get you a coupon for 20% off a single purchase between May 1 and September 30, 2023. You can then take the Bookstore Passport around to other bookstores to get more pages rubber stamped for coupons for each store. If you manage to get 12 stamps completed, then you get a 20% discount coupon for all 23 bookstores for a single purchase between May 1 And September 30, 2023. Anybody who manages to get all 23 pages rubber stamped on Saturday (which doesn’t allow much time for browsing) can also be entered for larger prizes in addition to all the coupons. With Uncle Hugo’s and Moon Palace Books being half a block apart, that makes it fast and easy to get your first 2 rubber stamps.

The last time we participated in Independent Bookstore Day, the celebration only involved Saturday, but this year the organizers are suggesting ways to stretch it out for a week. Monday is wear silly socks day, Tuesday is wear plaid day, Wednesday is dress as your favorite fictional character day, etc. The instructions do not make it clear if only bookstore staff are supposed to do this or if customers are also supposed to do this. We will only be participating with the Saturday events.

Steven Brust will be signing Tsalmoth (Vlad Taltos #16) on Saturday, April 29, from 1 to 2 pm. We have received our shipment of Tsalmoth, but cannot start selling it until Tuesday, April 25, and will not have signed copies until Saturday.

Knot of Shadows by Lois McMaster Bujold finally showed up (on my front porch at home instead of at the store) a few days ago and I’ve been shipping out copies to people who ordered in in advance.

People have been asking about the flood I wrote about last time. When this building was built in the 1920s, Minneapolis had a single sewer system for both sanitary sewage and storm sewage, and the roof of the building was slanted so that all the rain water flowed to the center of the roof and then down through a large pipe to the sewer pipe in the basement. With the single sewer system, every major summer rain storm effectively “flushed” the entire sewer system, resulting in untreated sewage flowing into the Mississippi and into some basements. About 40-45 years ago Minneapolis created a second sewer system to handle only storm sewage (primarily dumping the rain water into the city lakes instead of taking it to the sanitary sewage treatment plant), and all buildings were forced to divert the rain water from their roofs away from the sanitary sewage system. For this building, all the water still collected in the center of the roof, but then went through a cast iron pipe around 6 inches in diameter across the ceiling of the first floor, through the side of the building, and dumped into the alley to make it to the storm sewer system on the street. The part of the pipe outside the building is wrapped with electrical thermal tape, and then wrapped in fiber glass insulation, which is then wrapped with an aluminum-foil like coating. This system had kept the outside pipe from freezing through all of the below zero days all winter long, but the insulation blanket had slipped down a couple of inches over the winter, so that the water no longer dripped directly onto the alley–it instead sprayed onto the bottom of the fiber glass, froze over night in the fiber glass, and then the ice started creeping up the pipe. At the time the flood took place, there was a column of ice reaching down to the alley and reaching up the pipe for an unknown distance. I knock away the column of ice, and nothing happened. I then got a hammer and chisel and started breaking off pieces of ice within the pipe. Eventually, water started dripping from the bottom of the pipe. After more chiseling, all the ice came out of the pipe and water started gushing into the alley and stopped coming through the ceiling. I removed the fiber glass that had slipped down over the end of the pipe, and we’ve had no water problems since. Of course, there have been insurance problems. When I reported the flood, I was promised that I would be contacted by an adjuster within 2 days. Two weeks later I called again, talked to somebody who tried to claim that the water pouring through the ceiling had to have been caused by a sewer backup in the basement. An on-site adjuster came out a few days later, did a good examination of the situation, took lots of photos of the floor, the section where part of the ceiling fell, and the water-damaged books, and agreed with me that the sewer in the basement had nothing to do with the ice dam in the alley. A few weeks later I received a check for part of the estimated cost of repairing the floor, but nothing for repairing the ceiling. The insurance company also wants a title-by-title inventory of every book that got wet, and I haven’t had time to do that yet.

A couple of months ago I figured out where to fit the used mystery hardcovers on the first floor, and the first batch of bookshelves are being built to hold them. On Thursday I hired a moving company to haul another 19 bookshelves from my home over to the basement of the store to be used to arrange overstock books in the basement. We will start running used mystery hardcovers through the computer and putting them on shelves sometime in the next week or so, but it will probably take all summer to process all of the used mystery hardcovers and then be able to start buying them once we know what we already own.

The post office next door is being rebuilt from scratch, after it was burned during the George Floyd riots. The architect had told me that they were going to make it match the red brick on the Uncle Hugo’s building and on the church on the other side of Uncle Hugo’s. They then constructed the building with large concrete slabs trucked to the site, which have brick shapes on the outside surface of the slabs, but the same color as the rest of the concrete slab. A few days ago they started painting the brick shapes red, and it makes a big difference in the appearance, but it took a full day to paint about a 4 foot by 4 foot section, so it might take them months to get all the bricks painted.

Trylon Cinema (a 90 seat theater located about 2 blocks south of us) and Moon Palace Books (located about half a block west of us) sometimes put on free outdoor summer movies in the Moon Palace courtyard. They are planning to welcome Uncle Hugo’s to the neighborhood with a showing of Iron Giant on Thursday, May 11, at dusk (around 9 pm), unless it has to be postpone because of rain.