Column Babylon 5 Rewatch Babylon 5 Rewatch: “The Ragged Edge” Garibaldi’s alcohol problem complicates an investigation, and G’Kar is surprised to find himself a revered religious figure… By Keith R.A. DeCandido | Published on May 18, 2026 Credit: Warner Bros. Television Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Warner Bros. Television “The Ragged Edge”Written by J. Michael StaczynskiDirected by John CopelandSeason 5, Episode 12Production episode 513Original air date: April 8, 1998 It was the dawn of the third age… Sheridan is furiously signing copies of treaties for the member worlds of the IA. Unfortunately, the conference room is empty: the representatives of the IA member worlds are boycotting all meetings until their shipping lines’ security can be guaranteed. We cut to an Earth ship, Red Star 9, which is being attacked and destroyed, but a lifepod ejects with the pilot. Mollari and G’Kar return from Centauri Prime. G’Kar is confused as to why he’s receiving so much positive attention from his fellow Narns. They are bowing to him and treating him with an impressive reverence. Ta’Lon is awaiting him at his cabin, and he explains what’s going on as they catch up: concern over his traveling to Centauri Prime led to Narns on the station breaking into his quarters and taking possession of his (unfinished) book. And then someone—Ta’Lon isn’t sure who—had it printed. The Book of G’Kar has become a major bestseller on Narn, outstripping even The Book of G’Quan. G’Kar is mortified, both because it was done without his permission and because the book isn’t even finished yet. Garibaldi is awakened out of a sound sleep by Allan, who wants to know why he hasn’t shown up for their meeting. Garibaldi says he slept through his alarm, though the empty booze bottle next to his bed indicates another reason. The Rangers found the wreckage of Red Star 9, including that a lifepod is missing, which means the possibility of a witness to these attacks for the first time. However, the ship is believed to have been smuggling illegal goods for the Drazi, so neither Earth nor Drazi are likely to help with the investigation. Garibaldi, however, has a contact on the Drazi homeworld who can probably help. Sheridan authorizes him to head there, and says to take Franklin with him as backup. Garibaldi, however, says that his contact only knows Garibaldi—if someone he doesn’t know is with him, the whole thing will go sideways. So Garibaldi goes alone, after reassuring Franklin that this isn’t personal, they’re both still good friends, it’s purely a professional issue with the contact. G’Kar, accompanied by an unwelcome entourage of Narn fangoobers, meets with Mollari in the Zocalo. The latter is highly amused by G’Kar’s new status as a celebrity. Credit: Warner Bros. Television Garibaldi arrives on Drazi and meets his contact, Tafiq Azir, at his hotel room. They seem to be old friends, and there is absolutely nothing in his demeanor that indicates that he’d have a problem with Franklin coming along for the ride. Azir says the pilot is in hiding and being sought out by the Drazi government, but Azir can set up a meet. He and Garibaldi share a drink or twelve. Garibaldi passes out, and Azir goes off to set up the meet. However, he’s shot right outside the door to Garibaldi’s room. Garibaldi wakes up slowly, and wonders where Azir is. He goes out into the hall to see a Drazi standing over Azir. They get into a fight, and Garibaldi tosses the Drazi over the balcony to fall to his death on the street. He then checks on Azir, who dies in Garibaldi’s arms. Going downstairs to meet with the pilot, Garibaldi is instead attacked by a group of hooded people, who have already killed the pilot. The Drazi authorities show up and the hooded figures beat a hasty retreat—as does a badly bruised Garibaldi, who manages to get a signal to B5 and asks Delenn to send a White Star to pick him up. Ta’Lon talks G’Kar into speaking to the fangoobers who are assembled outside his quarters. G’Kar himself has no desire to lead or to teach, but Ta’Lon believes he has important things to convey to his fellow Narns. G’Kar reluctantly agrees and invites the fangoobers into his quarters. One of the things G’Kar says is that Narn must move past their distrust of other species. A fangoober points out that, early in the book, G’Kar says that the Centauri can’t be trusted and that Narns can only trust themselves. G’Kar points out that that was early in the book, and time has changed that particular occasion. (This is what happens when people publish first drafts…) G’Kar demonstrates why fundamentalism toward his text is a bad idea, as he tells the fangoober to put his face directly into the book—and then G’Kar closes the book violently on his nose, by way of demonstrating that implicitly trusting all Narns isn’t what should be read from that text. Garibaldi reports to Sheridan, Delenn, Franklin, and G’Kar about what happened on Drazi. He got a small gold disc off one of his attackers, but he doesn’t recognize it. He does know that the ones who attacked him weren’t Drazi, and they were waiting for Garibaldi specifically. They have a leak. Mollari finally shows up, apologizing for being late, and also recognizes the disc as being a button that is worn by Centauri palace guards. When Mollari asks where Garibaldi got it, he lies and says he got it from a vendor in the Zocalo. Mollari says he got ripped off, as it’s not actually worth anything. Everyone else plays along, and once Mollari is no longer in the room, G’Kar informs them of the attempt on Mollari’s life back on Centauri Prime. If he knows that his people have betrayed the IA, it could endanger his life. Franklin meets with Sheridan saying he’s been given a job offer. Dr. Kyle—who had Franklin’s job on B5 before he was transferred to Earth—is retiring as head of Xenobiological Research and wishes Franklin to replace him. Franklin has agreed, especially this will make it easier for him to catalogue the medical data for all IA worlds. We close with Garibaldi passed out drunk in bed. Get the hell out of our galaxy! Sheridan laments that nobody told him how much of the job of president would involve paperwork. Credit: Warner Bros. Television The household god of frustration. Garibaldi’s alcoholism is directly responsible for his friend’s death. If you value your lives, be somewhere else. Delenn works primarily as Ranger One here, collecting their report on the destruction of Red Star 9 and rescuing Garibaldi from Drazi. In the glorious days of the Centauri Republic… Mollari laments that he used to look forward to returning home to Centauri Prime and dread going to B5, and now it’s the other way around. Though it take a thousand years, we will be free. G’Kar is now a bestselling author and unwilling celebrity authority figure, complete with devoted fan base. We live for the one, we die for the one. The Rangers are the ones who find Red Star 9’s wreckage, thus setting the entire plot in motion. Welcome aboard. Back from “Point of No Return” is Marshall Teague as Ta’Lon; he’ll be back in “Objects at Rest.” John Castellanos plays Azir while Mirron E. Willis plays the pilot. Trivial matters. Kyle appeared in “The Gathering,” and was transferred to Earth some time between then and “Midnight on the Firing Line.” While the pilot movie was his only appearance, he’s been mentioned a few times since. Ta’Lon references the speech he gave to G’Kar to convince him to stay on B5 in “A Day in the Strife.” Mollari was almost assassinated on Centauri Prime in “In the Kingdom of the Blind.” G’Kar started writing his book in “Messages from Earth” when he was in the brig after assaulting Vir and Mollari in “Dust to Dust” and learning that Mollari has been working with Morden and his “associates.” Not surprising, therefore, that the early part of the book includes passages about not trusting the Centauri… The echoes of all of our conversations. “I worry, Ta’Lon, that my shadow may become greater than the message.” “If that happens, I give you my word that I will personally kill you.” “And this is supposed to put my mind at ease?” —G’Kar worried about the future, and Ta’Lon not helping. Credit: Warner Bros. Television The name of the place is Babylon 5. “As Mr. Garibaldi says, I think I’ll wait for the movie.” It’s weird, there’s nothing I can point to in this episode and say, “This is bad.” Indeed, there’s a lot of good here, from the serious damage being done by Garibaldi’s alcoholism to G’Kar dealing with his newly acquired fan base. But I’m also having a hard time dredging up any enthusiasm for the episode. Having said that, the episode is definitely well written. I particularly like the way Garibaldi is handling his alcoholism—or, rather, not handling it, but ignoring it and hoping it will go away. He also very carefully keeps Franklin at arm’s length. His excuse that Azir would balk at a person he doesn’t know being there sounds completely convincing, but it’s also total bullshit. (Credit to John Castellanos, by the way, who does an excellent job as Azir.) Garibaldi doesn’t want Franklin, a fellow addict and also a physician, to get too close for fear that Franklin will recognize that he’s fallen off the wagon the way Garibaldi saw that Franklin had succumbed to stim addiction in the past. Watching G’Kar get groupies is a delight. It’s also good to see Marshall Teague back as Ta’Lon and dispensing wisdom as he has in prior appearances. Ta’Lon’s one of those characters I wish we’d seen more of, but what we have seen has been excellent. And the Centauri plot moves forward, as our heroes finally learn who’s responsible for the attacks on IA ships. Still, the episode feels like inconsequential filler, even though it’s nothing like that at all. I had high hopes that things would feel better once the Byron story had come to a merciful end and stopped sucking all the air out of the show. Maybe it’s the direction from John Copeland; it’s only his second time ever in the director’s chair, following the similarly lackluster “Endgame.” Next week: “The Corps is Mother, the Corps is Father.”[end-mark] The post <i>Babylon 5</i> Rewatch: “The Ragged Edge” appeared first on Reactor.

News Lanterns Lanterns Trailer Shows Off Laura Linney, Superpowers, and Super Attitude We will refrain from making too many “It’s not easy being green” jokes while this show is on By Molly Templeton | Published on May 18, 2026 Screenshot: HBO Max Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: HBO Max Much has been made of the grounded, serious-business detective vibes of the upcoming DC Studios series Lanterns, which pairs a jaded Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) with newbie Green Lantern Corps recruit John Stewart (Aaron Pierre). So, naturally, the new trailer provides a bit of the opposite: glowing green stuff. Hal uses his powers to create a shield against some kind of space laser (and a more personal shield against a lot of bullets); he also uses them to manifest a dollar bill for a jukebox. Did he just give John a little speech about knowing when to use said powers, then turn around and counterfeit money? Certainly not. (Certainly so.) This trailer would like you to know that Lanterns has some attitude problems among its mysteries and multiple timelines. It’s a classic setup—the experienced elder faced with a brash young upstart who thinks he can do everything better—but with a whole lot of extra green. At the trailer’s end, after the question “Are you afraid?” is asked a million times, John tells a mysterious Laura Linney, “I’ll do this better than he’s ever done it before.” Linney, looking stern, says, “Then go and get it, John Stewart.” This seems not very partner-like! Linney’s character has not been named; her casting was announced pretty much simultaneously with the trailer’s release. But also: Guy Gardner (Nathan Fillion) is here, possibly in jail, looking quite grumpy. We get a quick look at Garret Dillahunt, whose character William Macon has been described as a “modern cowboy.” And Kelly Macdonald plays the sheriff in the small Nebraska town where a shooting has caught Hal’s interest. We also get to see Hal’s Green Lantern getup, and some shots of a younger Hal, who young John watched on TV. Never meet your heroes, right? A lot of this trailer is focused on Pierre who, as John Stewart says he was “raised fearless,” does a lot of dangerous, possibly terrifying things over the course of these two minutes. If you have any doubts about this series, I strongly suggest you go watch Rebel Ridge, which will show you that Pierre can carry a whole movie by himself, and can convincingly do a lot of action. (It’s also just a very good movie.) Lanterns comes from showrunner Chris Mundy (True Detective, Ozark) and premieres on HBO Max on August 16.[end-mark] The post <i>Lanterns</i> Trailer Shows Off Laura Linney, Superpowers, and Super Attitude appeared first on Reactor.

News hope Na Hong-jin’s Alien Invasion Film Hope Gets a First Trailer—and a Possible Sequel The new film from the director of The Wailing is coming this fall By Molly Templeton | Published on May 18, 2026 Screenshot: Neon Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: Neon Hope, the new film from director Na Hong-jin, has already been described as “Cannes’ craziest movie” after its premiere at the French festival. The rest of us just get a teaser—for now. There may be more Hope down the road: Na has already written a sequel. “So if I have the opportunity, I would indeed make a sequel if possible,” he told Variety. Hope stars Hwang Jung-min, Zo In-sung, Hoyeon Jung, Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, Taylor Russell, and Cameron Britton. Fassbender, Vikander, and Russell are playing aliens, which becomes quite interesting when you watch the teaser. These aliens are … well, the actors are not recognizable (though one may wonder if the aliens can change forms). Na’s teaser isn’t shy about showing the aliens, which look kind of like if you crossed a hairless version of the creatures from Attack the Block with a lanky T-rex, then maybe removed some skin. They have very big mouths and very big claws. Here’s the synopsis: In the remote South Korea village of Hope Harbor, police chief Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min) and officer Sung-ae (Hoyeon) are called to find a mysterious creature that has wreaked havoc on the village. In the nearby forest, a coterie of hunters, including Sung-ki (Zo In-sung), set out to track the beast and find themselves hunted instead. But all is not as it seems, and perceptions can be misleading. What begins as ignorance plants the seed of disaster, escalating through human conflict into a tragedy of cosmic proportions. Na told Deadline that he watched a lot of American action movies for inspiration, from Duel to Jaws to Die Hard to Lethal Weapon. “I wanted to reference from the eighties and nineties for that sort of lone hero cop style to be reflected in my movie,” he said. Reviews from Cannes have been mostly enthusiastic; The Hollywood Reporter said, “It’s a great feeling to know from a movie’s first frames that you’re in the hands of an assured genre auteur. The rare action thriller that takes place almost entirely in broad daylight, Hope pulls you in immediately with its virtuoso camerawork, pulse-pounding score, adrenalized pacing and sharply drawn characters.” Neon is releasing the movie in the U.S. this fall, but a specific release date has yet to be announced.[end-mark] The post Na Hong-jin’s Alien Invasion Film <i>Hope</i> Gets a First Trailer—and a Possible Sequel appeared first on Reactor.

Books SFF Bestiary Epic on the Riverbank: Revisiting The Wind in the Willows Like all great children’s stories, the adventures of Mole and Rat and Mr. Toad speaks to readers of all ages… By Judith Tarr | Published on May 18, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share In 1908, a newly retired banker published a compilation of stories that he had told to his young son. Kenneth Grahame was already an eminent writer in among the demands of his day job, but every writer knows, you’re only as successful as your last book. This new work was rejected by his regular publisher, and reviews at first trended toward the negative. This is a trope. Great work unrecognized at the time transforms into immortal classic. After its slow start, The Wind in the Willows became one of the most beloved children’s books of the twentieth century. It’s still going, a quarter of the way through the twenty-first. I can’t remember the first time I read it. I do recall what was in it, and that edition was abridged. It contained the main set of stories but left out the shorter interludes. Mostly it was about Mole and Rat and the boat, and Mr. Toad’s adventures with motor cars. Rereading it, with the missing parts now included, was an interesting experience. It didn’t shape my youth; it was one of a multitude of books that I read because they were there in the library, and I would read anything I could get my hands on. Its characters are familiar from other writers’ works and reviews as much as from their original appearance, not to mention such acts of homage as A. A. Milne’s play, Toad of Toad Hall. This combination of characters and story resonates deeply with whole generations of English and English-adjacent writers and poets. Like all great children’s stories, it speaks to all ages. It takes them back to a time that probably never existed, but they dearly wish it had. The series of linked stories recounts the adventures of a small cast of anthropomorphized animals. The Mole, bored with his annual spring-cleaning, gets it into his head to wander off until he finds the river. There he meets the Water Rat, a hospitable and obliging sort who invites him to share his house and join him in his forays in boats and along the river. There are frequent appearances by the Otter, a big, bluff fellow with a distinctly playful side, and the strong, often stern, but gentle and kind Badger. And then there’s Toad. Toad lives in Toad Hall, on a great estate, and he has, not to put too fine a point on it, issues. He’s good-hearted, we’re frequently told, but he has no filters. He gets obsessions. He becomes addicted, and needs interventions. He gets himself into terrible predicaments, which his friends have to get him out of, but he never really learns anything (though he insists early and often that he is going to change, he is, he’s going to turn over a new leaf this time, really, seriously). These are animals, we’re told explicitly. But they live in elaborate houses. They wear clothes and wield tools and carry weapons. They read books, write poetry, compose songs. There are humans in this world. The animals live alongside them. When Toad steals a motor car and goes on a wild joy ride, the car belongs to a party of humans, and it’s humans who chase him, catch him, send him to trial, and lock him in a dungeon with a twenty-year sentence. He makes his escape by winning over the gaoler’s daughter and impersonating a washerwoman. The impersonation is such a success that he has difficulty resuming his original identity. Clearly Toad is the same size as a human (hence his ability to steal a car and drive it recklessly across the country), and has a face and voice that convinces humans that he’s [a] one of them and [b] a woman. When he is outed, he gets some blowback of the “Eeeuuuwww, slimy toad!” sort, but in general humans and animals coexist along parallel and mostly compatible tracks. They have their own spheres and concerns, but they’re not fundamentally in conflict. They’re all in the world together, if not usually in the same spaces. Toad Hall may have originally been human-built. Toad’s father took it over and bequeathed it to his feckless son. Humans don’t seem to have contested the takeover. The Badger’s Sett has a similar history. Badger and his family have expanded and renovated it, but originally they seem to have been colonists. They found it and claimed it. This is very much a reflection of the late British Empire. Mole leaves the home he built himself and goes traveling, and moves in with Ratty, where he stays indefinitely except for a brief return to his old home. He realizes he missed it, once he sees it again, but he goes back to being an expatriate. He can go home when he wants to, but he prefers the wider horizons of the river and its environs. So many of the underpinnings are invisible. Food and clothes mostly just appear. Money is almost always there, without a clear sense of where it comes from. We get an occasional glimpse of the infrastructure that has to exist in order to support these privileged animals, especially during Toad’s washerwoman era (and what an education that is for that son of the landed gentry), but for the most part it’s just there. All of these animals can go where they like, do what they like, help and hinder each other, go exploring, put on elaborate parties, and it’s all just part of the world they so comfortably live in. It’s not a completely secure world. There are Things in the Wild Wood, which emerge and cause no little damage. Bad behavior has consequences, and sometimes they’re serious. But everything rights itself sooner or later. Reading these stories as an adult is interesting not just because I see so much more of what’s underneath, but because of beloved authors and works that took inspiration from Grahame’s world and characters. There is so much of Grahame in C. S. Lewis’ Narnia. His Talking Animals are the direct heirs of Mole and Rat and Badger and Toad. He takes them to great lengths and overlays them with explicit Christianity, but they’re still recognizable. Tolkien’s debt to Grahame is less obvious. He has a broad range of sources and inspirations, not to mention the whole concept of building a world on an invented language. And yet hobbits and the Shire have a distinct flavor of Grahame’s animals and their river and the dark Wood that borders it. One little Easter egg is the fox in the Wood. In The Fellowship of the Ring, a fox sees the hobbits sleeping in the wild, wonders what on earth they’re doing there, but never learns any more about it. She’s in Grahame, too, in a similar, rather random scene. Hobbits in some ways are an intermediate species between Grahame’s animals and human beings. They’re small, closer to the size of real rats and moles and badgers, with furry feet, but their land and their culture are quite like the world of Grahame’s stories. Mole, like Bilbo, sets off on an adventure that changes his life forever; he does go home eventually but he doesn’t stay there. He chooses adventure. The Scouring of the Shire has certain echoes of the re-taking of Toad Hall—and it’s had the same history of mixed reviews. Some critics see it as a fizzle rather than a grand finale. They would prefer a more heroic ending, with a bigger apparent payoff. I don’t doubt that Tolkien’s work would have existed without Grahame, but it might not have been quite the same. Grahame’s world is a distillation of the one he lived in, the end of the Victorian era and the beginning of the Edwardian, before the First World War broke that world in pieces. For Tolkien and Lewis, who lived through the war and then the one after it, it’s as remote and as poignant as Tolkien’s Elvenhome when the Two Trees were in flower.[end-mark] The post Epic on the Riverbank: Revisiting <i>The Wind in the Willows</i> appeared first on Reactor.

Books bookstores Let’s Talk About Our Favorite Used Bookstores Here’s to digging for treasure in the endless shelves of bookstores past and present… By James Davis Nicoll | Published on May 18, 2026 Photo by Glen Noble [via Unsplash] Comment 0 Share New Share Photo by Glen Noble [via Unsplash] In reply to a recent essay, Mayhem said “I can definitely still remember my first few second hand bookstores. Those are indelible.” Moi aussi! I may forget people’s names and faces, or why I am standing in the kitchen, or just where I hung my cane, etc. That is because my brain seethes with memories that actually matter1, memories which involve books, and as a corollary, bookstores2. Don’t believe me? Herewith, some accounts of used bookstores that were very important to teen me. When a young bibliophile, I soon discovered that used books are cheaper than new books3. Given a fixed amount of money to spend (my allowance), it was obvious that I could afford more used books than new books. A few years later, I realized that books go out of print. As I’ve mentioned before, regular bookstores are limited to books that are in print (and for practical reasons, only a subset of those books). Used bookstores offer access to books otherwise impossible to purchase. The first used bookstore I remember is the Book Barn, located at 12 King Street North, Waterloo. Established by Mark Shapiro and later run by Randy and Sylvia Hannigan, the Book Barn was a conveniently short hike, a mere 1.7 km from UWaterloo, where my father taught. The Book Barn got a considerable fraction of my allowance; one particularly memorable purchase was my second Poul Anderson MMPB, There Will Be Time. I was sad to see it go. The Book Barn was the only used bookstore to which I was introduced by my parents. I was quick to generalize. However, I was not quick to see the utility of the Yellow Pages in this matter. I tended to rely on random wandering and dumb luck. One such discovery was the Book Nook, located at 77 Ontario Street South, which, as previously mentioned, I first noticed when I was out on a school excursion4. I regret to say that I cannot remember the name of the woman who owned and operated the Book Nook—I don’t think she ever introduced herself to me—but she tolerated my complete lack of social skills, my weekly perusal of every single paperback in the science fiction and fantasy section, and the small change I presented in exchange for treasures such as a battered copy of the Berkley Medallion edition of Laumer’s Greylorn. I cannot recall how I discovered KW Bookstore, founded in 19755 and still located at 308 King St. West, Kitchener, Ontario. It then held, and still holds, a treasure trove of books and magazines. One’s browsing experience was greatly enhanced by the then-owners’ refusal to engage in such effete practices as arranging books in alphabetical order by author’s surname. Books were sorted purely by genre and the order in which the owners had bought them. Books were also double and tripled stacked. This taught me the value of relentless thoroughness in browsing, as there was otherwise no telling what treasures were hidden at the back of the shelf. Among its many noteworthy qualities is the fact that KW Bookstore is the only Kitchener-Waterloo used bookstore from my teen years that is still in operation6. The purchase I most remember: walking in as cases of books, the proceeds of an estate sale, were being stacked. The owners really didn’t want to go through each box, so offered me the box on the top for five bucks if I’d take it away with me immediately. Inside I found an almost complete run of Travis McGee novels, from The Deep Blue Good-by to The Dreadful Lemon Sky. Score! I discovered Harry Kremer’s Now & Then, which was then located at 103 Queen South, Kitchener, when my family and I walked past it on our way to a movie. I was irked when my parents refused to let me enter and browse on the absurd pretext that the movie we were planning on seeing was going to begin soon. Well, it also helped that the store wasn’t open.7 Because I didn’t think to note the address or look in the Yellow Pages, it took me two years to find the store again. Now & Then at that time was a bit of an odd duck, in that it sold a wider assortment of goods than most used bookstores: books, but also direct sales comics, games, and used records8. For me, Now & Then was about the books, but it’s more likely that if you’ve heard of Now & Then, it is in the context of it being one of Canada’s first direct sales comic stores. It’s no exaggeration to say that Harry and his Now & Then were a Kitchener institution and it was a tragedy when he died in 2002. I can’t remember the first book in the first sack of books I hauled home from Now & Then, but there is a purchase I do remember. I and three other members of WatSFiC, UWaterloo’s SFF club, were buying books for the club’s library9. A diversity of opinion precluded consensus. Even numbers produced deadlocks. We had only two unanimous decisions: everyone agreed we should buy John Bellairs’ The Face in the Frost and we all agreed that we should NOT buy Pel “Lionel Fanthorpe” Torro’s Galaxy 666. Those are the local used bookstores that consumed much of my disposable income half a century ago. Did used bookstores play a similar role for you? Please reminisce about them in comments below.[end-mark] You might think “consciously dating people with the same given name so as to make remembering it easier” is a brilliant hack. It is. Telling one of them that one of their paramount qualities is having the same name as their predecessors and inevitable replacements turns out to be injudicious. ︎I will limit myself to Waterloo Region used bookstores. I’ve been to bookstores in many cities and countries by now, most notably Hay-on-Wye. Reactor does not have enough hard drive space for an in-depth discussion of Hay-on-Wye’s used bookstores.I was tempted to include Bakka despite it being in Toronto, but it deserves an essay of its own. Enjoy! ︎Imagine my fury when in a San Francisco used bookstore I discovered a 35 cent MMPB that was priced at 75 cents. The cheek! ︎We were mapping downtown Kitchener for a school project. ︎Although I am told it was actually a continuation of an earlier used bookstore, founded in the 1950s. ︎Kitchener-Waterloo has other used bookstores, including Old Goat Books and A Second Look Books. These were founded after the period in question. ︎Not as much of an impediment as one might expect. 103 Queen South was an old building with many quirks, one of which was that the mail slot for Now & Then’s unit was big enough that a skinny kid could reach his arm through to unlock the door. Owner Harry Kremer only realized this after he noticed stock was vanishing after closing and parked himself inside in the dark to see if he could discover why.I hasten to add that I was not that skinny kid. I was the person who rented that space after Harry, when I discovered that the modification he made to the lock to prevent repeats of the exploit made it possible for me to lock myself into my own store.If I had a nickel for every time I’d been locked into my own building, I’d have fifteen cents. ︎As I recall, records were in the basement unit, which had Harry’s mother behind the register. ︎Since broken up, thanks to WUSA’s relentless efforts to that end. ︎The post Let’s Talk About Our Favorite Used Bookstores appeared first on Reactor.