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Living Batch Bookstore

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Gus Blaisdell at The Living Batch Bookstore

Living Batch Bookstore

From the abq journal 1996

Living Batch’s Last Day Dec. 24

The Living Batch, one of the oldest bookstores in New Mexico, is closing next month, after being in business on the same block for 27 years.

On Dec. 24 it will shut its doors at 106 Cornell SE, which is next door to the Frontier restaurant.

“The main reason we’re closing is that I don’t want to do it any more,” said owner Gus Blaisdell, a parttime film instructor at the University of New Mexico.

But that decision is influenced by several factors.

One is the arrival of the mega-bookstores in the Northeast Heights.

Their immediate effect is that a variety of customers no longer shop at the Living Batch.

“Before the superstores, we discovered that the most interesting sale days in our store were weekends. People drove from all over the city to come and shop,” Blaisdell said.

Another factor is his disenchantment with mainstream publishing.

“The price of books is excluding young readers,” he said, noting that three hardback books can retail for as much as $100.

Blaisdell said he’s considered, and rejected, the notion of reducing the store’s space and narrowing the subjects to what the Living Batch specializes in — alternative fiction, poetry, politics, art and architecture, psychoanalysis and works from small presses.

If the store changed its direction and size, Blaisdell said, there probably wouldn’t be sufficient readers to buy books “in these prices, in these times in Albuquerque.”

In addition, he said, none of his children nor present or former employees expressed interest in maintaining the bookstore.

“A literary period of mass readership for the small bookstore is passing out of democratic politics,” Blaisdell said. “I think inexpensive books should be available to a large number of people, if they want to read.

“So, through various circumstances, we have become extinct.”

Gus, thank you for your generous contribution to the Rio Grande High School Writing Class! Rudy J Miera

Gus, keep writing your work, Jimmy Santiago Baca

I KNOW A MAN

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In 2002, a year before his death, Gus wrote the bio below to accompany his poems included in  IN COMPANY: an anthology of New Mexico Poets after 1960

                                                                                      photo by Nicole Blaisdell Ivey

Gus Blaisdell for twenty-seven years ran an “alternative to an absence,” the Living Batch Bookstore, always close to the Frontier Restaurant. He continues to teach film at the University of New Mexico. He runs a small press, Living Batch Books , that continues to present his alternative to absences. A special line of his books is called Drive, He Said, after Creeley’s poem “I Know A Man.”

GUS BLAISDELL COLLECTED

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Writings on Lewis Baltz, John Gossage, Evan Connell, Frank Stella, Terry Conway, Guy Williams, Hitchcock, Wim Wenders, Kubrick, Joel-Peter Witkin, Thomas Barrow, Stanley Cavell, Robert Creeley, Plato’s Phaedrus, Ross Feld, Rachel Whiteread, James Baldwin, Allen Graham, Don Dudley, Carroll Dunham, …and then some…

GUS BLAISDELL COLLECTED

Cover photo by Nicole Blaisdell Ivey

CONTENTS:

Editor’s Preface: by William Peterson

Foreword: by Stanley Cavell

Introduction:  “On Slipping Across: Reading, Friendship, Otherness” by David Morris

On Photographs:

  1. Absorbing Inventories: Thomas Barrow’s “Libraries Series”
  2. Afterworld: Photographs of Joel-Peter Witkin
  3. BLDGS: Photographs of Lewis Baltz
  4. Space Begins Because We Look Away From Where We Are: Lewis Baltz, Candlestick Point
  5. Buried Silk Exhumed: The Lewis Baltz Retrospective, Rule Without Exception
  6. From Obscenity in Thy Mother’s Milk: John Gossage’s “HF!” Portfolio
  7. Thirteen Ways of NOT Looking at a Gossage Photograph

On Movies:

Passion Misfits Us All: Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas

  1. Death’s Blue-Eyed Boy: Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket
  2. Still Moving
  3. Highlighting Hitchcock’s Vertigo with Magic Marker

 

On Painting:

  1. Frank Stella’s The Whiteness of the Whale
  2. Passion and the Pine Breeze: The Paintings of Terry Conway
  3. Guy Williams: On In: Outside
  4. Original Face: Allan Graham’s Moon 2
  5. Poem: Omoide No Tsukimi

 

On Reading & Writing:

  1. A Gloss Annexed
  2. Vatic Writing: Evan Connell’s Notes from a Bottle . . .
  3. Tell It Like It Is: The Experimental Traditionalists
  4. Rebus
  5. What Was Called A Thought Echoed in Sight: Yvor Winters’ Centennial
  6. Poem: Occasional Loquats: For Janet Lewis
  7. For Robert Creeley on his 70th Birthday
  8. A Nobler Seduction
  9. Slipping Across

Fiction: Radical Philosophical Reclamation & Wrecking, The TLP Hotel (4 Excerpts)

Shorts & Excerpts from Correspondence

Envoi: by Ira Jaffe

Chronology: by Nicole Blaisdell Ivey

Bibliography