When I received the email from Nikki Blaisdell-Ivey and Larry Goodell about their proposed Living Batch book, I had just been indulging in a Living Batch moment. I was reading my used paperback copy of The Good Soldier Schweik, remembering how I’d bought it—ostensibly at the one dollar used cost, but forty percent discounted because I was a Living Batch employee way back there in the 70s. Funny, I’d read the book soon after I purchased it, and now, almost forty years later, I am reading it again and the past comes rushing in on me like a pack of unfed dogs. I’d been thinking often lately of the Batch, how it had been an important part of my life for a large amount of time—two tours as an employee (eight years in the 70s, and then after a two-year hiatus of hiding out in Arkansas, a six-year stint…

I came to the Batch in the mid eighties. I had been managing the UNM Bookstore’s general book department for a number of years and shared many book conversations with Gus [Blaisdell]. Gus invited me to join the Batch as buyer and manager together with Jeff Bryan. I joined Sigrun, Larry, Geary Hobson, Seth Fiedler, Eileen Jackson. The store deeply felt the loss of Carl Christensen. The recent move around the corner from Central to Cornell had been jarring, and perhaps my arrival was also a jolt.

The storefront at 106 Cornell SE was a narrow space but it reached quite surprisingly far back. Over a few years, we cleared out moribund used book inventory, a new clerestory brought in more daylight, a floor plan evolved in a zig-zag down the center guiding the browser – like a pin-ball machine – all the way to the back.  Some particularly dilapidated couches…