to sell (goods) by retail; to parcel out; to recount or tell again in detail
Rigid Model 500 pipe threading machine, March 2000
Enjoyed operating this as a kid, in the back of the store, behind bolts and nails, near the plate glass and springs and 20 foot lengths of galvanized pipe.
Half-heartedly contemplating a proposal for a paper, for this conference — The Prosaic Imaginary: Novels and the Everyday, 1750-2000. Mine elaborates on accumulated notes and thoughts about hardware stores in art and literature. Would explore the intersection between these two genres — hardware stores, and fiction — both a form of retailing. It’s quite a mishmash of connections.
But deadline looms, and other realities assert themselves...
but I did manage to put something together.
CFP here.
Discussion of the Rigid Model 500 (among other things) here.
Unevenly annotated (and only partial) list of fiction with significant incorporation of hardware stores here.
The larger hardware store literature project here.
—
“Everything expresses itself in hardware. It has a more general application even than finance...”
Earl Codrington to May-Beth Sleason, in Hugh Hood (1928-2000 *) his Be Sure to Close Your Eyes (1993)
tags:
Rigid Model 500 pipe threader; hardware; machinery
Hugh Hood, Be Sure to Close Your Eyes (1993)