(Image: Rod Huntress)

(Image: Rod Huntress)

By Kimberly Kinchen

Bookkeeping is a new, occasional series touring some favorite places from Capitol Hill and the nearby via bookshelves, covers, and spines

Small bookshelves are tucked into establishments all over Capitol Hill. What’s on them, and why? In Bookkeeping, CHS asks small businesses on and around the Hill to open their books to us. For this inaugural post, we spoke to Brandon Waterman, co-owner, with Jason Marqusee, of Good Weather in Seattle, one of the Hill’s collection of bike shop-slash-cafes. You can find Good Weather’s book collection on their bookshelf just inside the front door of their Chophouse Row shop.

How does a book make it onto this shelf? Most of those books are mine. Some aren’t there — we have more in the back — because not all cycling books feel inclusive, so to speak. Bike shops have traditionally been male and fast, and that space is really negative. And some of the books were all about how to be a dedicated, perfect cyclist. And it’s like — “Maybe it’s not about that.”

The bookshelf doesn’t get used much now that we don’t have indoor seating. Which will come back soon, hopefully. But the way that books show up, each one has their own unique story. It’s a little bit like looking through your closet….I can look at every single garment that’s in my closet and know where it came from and have like a story behind it like, “Oh, I got that at Crossroads, I got that when I went on vacation to Japan.”….Some of them come from friends. Some of them come from collections that we’ve had for a long time. And then some of them just magically showed up. There’s a series of maps, because a lot of cycling is finding your way around. And while there’s really good resources for that online, there’s also a huge amount of printed and interesting material….A lot of those maps came from a guy who was touring in the Pacific Northwest, from here up into British Columbia. He had a bunch of maps sent here before he arrived from Europe. And when he came back through to fly out, he left them with us. Continue reading →