Harumph!!!

Today was the first day I have been indignant at Logos.  It seemed to be a day like any other day.  I like it that my afternoons seem to be busier these days, with less and less time alone in the store.

This time I brought a book from home to read, a David Baldacci called "The Winner."  I knew I couldn't finish it, but I felt like reading a "blood and gore" novel, after finishing my non-fiction book about the Alaska gold rush, and have several perfectly good "real" boks here that I've been meaning to read.

I read the book for a long time and at some point got up to take a break and mosey through the stacks.  I was looking through the travel section to see if maybe we had taken in a book on the Ukraine (we had not), but I picked up a Baedeker travel book on San Francisco.

I'm always interested in books about my home town and this one had lots of nice color pictures and gave thumbnail histories on many of the buildings I am very familiar with.

However, reading one history stopped me cold and made me first check the publication date (1992), and second want to contact the publisher IMMEDIATELY to find out of the egregious printed error had been corrected.

The book was giving the history of the newish St. Mary's Catholic cathedral in San Francisco (the one that looks like a washing machine agitator) and in talking about how it came to be built said "it was built on the grounds of an old grocery store."

I. beg. your. pardon.  It was NOT built on the grounds of any grocery store.  It was built on the grounds of my old high school, which had been established on that corner in 1938.

I was still fuming about it when a guy came in with his wife and was talking to me about a cookbook from San Francisco, which led to a talk about San Francisco in general and of course I had to bring up the error I had just found in the travel book.   It reminded him of when his grandmother used to take him to Mass in the old Cathedral, a block away (which burned down--we always figured the Bishop got someone to set the fire so he could build this brand new church).

I told him about how the girls of my high school did a "living rosary" in that beautiful old building every year, where the seniors stood in line that wound around the aisles of the church, and formed the beads in the rosary.   (Walt always asked if we carried bowling balls.)

After work, Walt and I went out to dinner at DeVere's, the Irish pub around the corner from the book store, which was having, this month "Melt Night" on Thursdays, different toasted cheese sandwiches each Thursday.  Tonight was "crab melt" night so we decided to check it out.

We lucked out because the musicians, who usually play on a different night, were there and it was fun to listen to the music, or as much as we could make out over all the noise. 

At one point I looked around and pointed out to Walt that I thought we were old enough to be grandparents to everybody in the place!  He agreed.

But dinner was delicious.

and I even had a Stella Artois beer to go along with my crab.  I ate all the inside part of the sandwich and then asked for a box for the crusts, because I am so used to saving the crusts for the dogs!  (They were very happy when we got home and I gave them to them!)

As soon as we had watched Jeopardy and the dogs had been fed, I came in here to the computer to look up Baedeker and see if there was any contact information with the publisher, but I discovered it's a German publishing house whose web site is in German and they don't seem to be active any more (though Wikipedia has a geneaology history of the Baedeker family back several generations!)

I did, however, leave a snarky comment on the Amazon page for the 2000 edition of the San Francisco travel book..

You don't mess with St. Vincent alumnae and get away with it all that easily!