Duels At Dawn : The Second Book of Essays

From the Introduction: You have economic hard times to thank for this book. I am by profession a bookseller. In 2007, a friend suggested a newsletter as a way of enhancing book sales. I think she had monthly specials, promo sheets and upcoming new titles in mind, but I was too dense for that. Instead I wrote on topics of my own fancy. The first two years, 2007-9, when the newsletter appeared monthly were, well, dreadful. The week that Venus went retrograde in March, 2009, with the stock market stabilizing after months of plunging, I shifted from a monthly single-page newsletter, to a weekly three-pager. I followed a three-page format for a couple of years. Most of the worth-while essays were compiled in my first book, Skeet Shooting for Astrologers. Two years later in March, 2011, with the economy ever more bleak and myself running out of ideas, I started writing celebrity delineations and in the process broke out of a rigid format. The delineation of Jon Stewart, of the Daily Show, was the first of these. Retrograde Venus has turned up in a surprising number of the charts I've written about, given its rarity, among them, the chart for the Republican Party, as well as the charts for Rep. Ron Paul, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Jon Stewart, and some others. No, my Venus is not retrograde. Essays are in order of publication, in part as I think organizing by topic makes for a boring block of reading. The book starts with the last of the 2-column essays from the original 3-page weekly. Meanwhile the economy is now in the fifth year of straight decline. I do wish the people in charge of the country would just send us all envelopes stuffed with cash. I can live on barter just as well as money, but when that happens there will be no authors, there will be no books, there will be no commerce. Money has its uses.