Most Of You Don’t Know This…
Our bookstore, North By Northwest Books and Antiques has one of the largest pharmaceutical collections in the world. All for sale.
Sheldon McArthur, the former owner, loved collecting the stuff and he even found old drugstores that had gone out of business in the 1940s but nothing had been touched for fifty years. He would go there and clean them out.
I bought it all when I bought the bookstore.
Well, our store and strange collection was discovered by a YouTube program called Finding Goodies where these guys go around and look for nifty stuff and do videos about it.
Dan (who does an amazing job running the bookstore) knows a ton about this stuff and gave the guys of the program a great tour.
So here is the video. If you want to see our store and learn a ton about the history of drugs, give a watch. Fascinating stuff, if I do say so myself, considering I own it all. (grin)
And speaking of the bookstore, we are almost all done with getting everything out for the supporters of the kickstarter. We have a few more school and library systems to get responses from, then all done. And the expansion on the store is actually increasing even more than we thought in the kickstarter. We will be taking over the store next door and expanding into it.
Enjoy the look into a part of one of our stories.
Wow, that’s a crazy amount of stuff. If you were in California, you could set up a movie prop business! How do you handle the old contents? I’d guess some of those “medicines” were pretty nasty. “Feeling plugged up! Have a little mercury! It’ll clean you right out!” lol.
Dean, not sure if you’re aware of this place or not, but there is a museum in Alexandria, VA called the Stabler-Leadbeater Apothecary Museum. I dunno–maybe they have some missing pieces that need to be replaced. Link: https://www.alexandriava.gov/Apothecary
And if anyone else is visiting the Washington, DC area, this is a great museum to go to. Especially if you’re a writer. The museum was shuttered as is in the Depression. Everything was left inside until the building was turned into a museum. The city has been doing restoration work on it as well. I went in years ago, and only two floors were open. When I went back recently, the city had opened the third floor, and there’s a fourth being worked on. Hint, hint: There’s a historical tavern nearby.