I just finished watching Opening Night on DVD again after having not seen it since it opened in LA sometime around Christmas in 1977.

1977.  LA.  Another lifetime ago.

That would be the first Christmas season at Intellectuals & Liars with Jimmy, Gordon, & Joel, before Randy joined us, or Bill.  What did we sell then: the literature, the poetry: the small press editions like Black Sparrow copies of Charles Bukowski or Mulch Press books of Paul Blackburn, novels by Joan Didion, Thomas Hardy, Hemingway, E.M. Forster, Tom McGuane, Don DeLillo, Robert Coover, Gary Snyder, Charles Olson, Jack Kerouac, Frank O’Hara.  Barely 1000 feet of selling space divided into 2 rooms, those reminder tables in the back with hardcover copies of Scandinavian plays for $1.98 and the hardcover copy I kept of Sunflower Splendor, 3000 years of Chinese poetry, which I have here in Istanbul and periodically still lose myself…