Saturday, June 27, 2009

Sale!!!!!!!!!!!



















Beginning June 28th and lasting through July 4th, everything in the shop is 30% off! We're not going out of business (yet!), but we'd like to take a big bite out of all the books people are trying to sell us. At the moment, we're turning away far too many people, so it's time to raise some capital! Come take away our best stock at prices so low, it'll make us weep!

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Sweet land of liberty, wherefore art thou?






















Wouldn't it be great to be from a country that was so ridiculously awesome and full of win that you woke with fire in your belly every morning, knowing that you were in the best place on Earth, perhaps the most just, honorable, and beautifully varied spot in the entire universe? Not a country in the middle of an epic fail. Not a country that's a thinly veiled oligarchy calling itself a democracy. Not a country that coins 'net slang like, "full of win," and "epic fail."

What would such a country look like? Well, for our part, we'd ask for a big bump in the functional literacy rate. According to an NEA report, nearly 60% of Americans don't read a single book in a year's time. And most of the people who do? They ain't readin' Heidegger.

While we're at it, we might rewrite some laws so corporations have FEWER rights than actual living people instead of more. Just sayin'. Surely, we all have our wish list...

People used to feel good about our country, back in dinosaur times. Well, they felt better about it, anyway. But that was probably mostly thanks to ignorance. Thanks, ignorance! You make us feel better!

Maybe WE'RE the evil ones, trying to promote culture and knowledge and all that pansy-fied nonsense! Ignorance is like a great big sumo-suit keeping reality at a constant safe distance from your tender flesh! It's kevlar for reality-bullets! Persistent, durable, ubiquitous - If we could figure out how to fry it up and eat it, we'd be in business!

Looks like it's hard to know who's evil, or what to do in a situation like this. Are greedy CEOs evil? Or are the share-holders who demand constantly expanding profits from the CEOs the evil ones? Because those share-holders are mostly regular people. Ugh. Complexity make Bizarro's head hurt!





















There IS another way to feel better about things, no ignorance required. Be a psychopath. Those are people who exhibit chronic immoral and antisocial behavior. We're used to thinking of psychopathic people as killers or rapists, but as the late, lamented Kurt Vonnegut pointed out, it's a pretty good description of the people running the show these days. There's more than one way to kill or rape, after all.

It also makes sense that such people would end up in positions of power. When facing a choice with heavy moral or ethical implications, their options are limited only by imagination and inclination, whereas a sane person's conscience will narrow his/her choices sharply. You won't pull the trigger, but they will! These crazy fuckers will DRINK YOUR MILKSHAKE!

There's a perfect July 4th poem by Vonnegut, from a super-rare chapbook of his, The Twelfth of Never. If you had a copy of that, you wouldn't need to be a psychopath to get rich!

Happily, crappily
we roll along.
Happily, crappily
we sing our song.
U-S-A! U-S-A!
Germans to the left of us!
Commies to the right!
Blast 'em all! Blast 'em all!
Blast them!
Good night!
Napalm in the morning
Napalm at night
Napalm from Harvard
Good night!
Good night!
Good night!

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This week:

All items mentioned below are first come, first serve. If you want something, let us know post-haste (because they're also for sale on the interweb)! All new items sell for cover price, used items as marked. Sadly, trade credit cannot be used for new items.

Our books are always searchable via ABEbooks.

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The Great Red Dragon, or The Master Key to Popery, Anthony Gavin
(Paperback; facsimile of 1854 edition)

This book is anti-Catholic. Our shop and its ownership are not nor should ever be construed to be anti-Catholic or against popish idolatry in any way. In fact, we here all wish we could place our noses inside the pope's own nose and thus breathe the holiest of holy airs on their way to respirate the holiest lungs chosen by god hisself (and several dudes in crazy purple robes with golden croziers chanting in a dead language.) Amen!

($20)

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Mr. Arashi's Amazing Freak Show, Suehiro Maruo
(Paperback, out of print)

This is a book for perverts. And by perverts, we mean anyone interested in the dark heart of the human race. And that's all of us, right? So get ready for your dose of puppy-squashing! We'll throw in a little cunnilingus and eyeball-lingus for spice and call it a deal! Finally, we get what all those kiddies dig about them Japanese comix!

($60) [Sold]

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Blast 2: War Number, Wyndham Lewis, ed.
(Paperback)

This book is printed by Black Sparrow Press. It's cover is made of very nice paper. Ezra Pound is inside, as is T.S. Eliot, and Ford Maddox Ford. Modernism had to be born someplace. This is its steaming placenta.

($10) [Sold]

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Martell's Simplified Ju Jutsu Offence and Defense
, Jules Martell
(Stapled pamphlet, 1942)

This book will teach you to kick ass. It has lethal moves and is very violent. It also contains disparaging remarks directed toward Nazis and Japanese people. But it has another side, too. A side not so scarred by early childhood abuse and neglect. This other side of Simplified Ju Jutsu just needs love... and you will give it, or get your ass whupped good!

($50)

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Yeti Researcher, Vol. 24, No. 8
, Joshuah Bearman, ed.
(Paperback)

This book was part of McSweeney's no. 17, and is a clever-clogs send-up of academic journals. Not that academic journals don't merit parody, but we wish this was real.

($5)

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Flesh-eating robots!

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Everything's turning into a pile of shit.



Except this.





















It's available at Wall of Sound!

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Downhill Sumo!



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# of weeks since Spine and Crown inception: 190

# of weeks since inception that no mention of Spine and Crown has appeared in the print edition of The Stranger: 190

Saturday, June 20, 2009

He Hit Me






















We had started this week's newsletter, wondering aimlessly about the nature of decision-making. Hot stuff, for sure. But it IS intriguing because there's so much mystery surrounding it. No one, not scientist nor mystic, can accurately describe or predict our decisions - least of all, ourselves! But our decisions can be manipulated. Plenty of research shows this. The existence of the advertising industry shows this. And one of the people who has explored this manipulation time and again, with great success, is Adam Curtis.

Curtis is a BBC documentarian, but that gives the wrong impression. Like saying Spine and Crown is a place where capital and commodities are exchanged. There's something very artistic, fascinating, and hypnotic about what he does. He's responsible for The Century of the Self, an examination of how Freudian ideas have, through advertising, made us all into selfish dicks. But he's best known for The Power of Nightmares, which investigated the deeply intertwined development of radical Islam and Neo-conservatism.

He's far more qualified than we are to talk about how outside forces shunt us this way and that- and he's got a new film, It Felt Like a Kiss.

We'll let The Guardian's Charlie Brooker take it from here:

So what's it about? In a roundabout way, it's about you. But it's also about the golden age of pop, when the US rose to supreme power. It encompasses everything from Rock Hudson, Lou Reed, Saddam Hussein, a chimp and Lee Harvey Oswald. It's a heady brew.

"I think it's a fascinating period," says Curtis.

"I wanted to do a film about what it actually felt like to live through that time ... Where you could see the roots of the uncertainties we feel today, the things they did out on the dark fringes of the world that they didn't really notice at the time, which would then come back to haunt us."

It's a common theme in Curtis's work: he's not interested in conspiracy theories, but rather with the unforeseen consequences of ideas throughout history, and their impact on a deeply personal level. "The way power works in the world is: they tell you stories that make sense of the world. That's what America did after the second world war. It told you wonderful dreamlike stories about the world ... And at that same time, you were encouraged to rise up and 'become an individual', which also made the whole idea of America attractive to the rest of the world. But then this very individualism began to corrode it. The uncertainties began in people's minds. Uncertainty about 'what is the point of being an individual?'"

"The politics of our time are deeply embedded in this idea of individualism," he continues, "which is far wider than Westminster, consumerism or anything like that. It's how you feel. People think, 'Oh, if it's within me it must be true.' But it's not the be-all and end-all. It's not an absolute. It's a way of feeling and thinking which is a product of a particular time and power. The notion that you only achieve your true self if your desires, your dreams, are satisfied ... It's a political idea. That's the central dynamic of our life."

Because you're worth it? He nods. "Because you're worth it."
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This week:

All items mentioned below are first come, first serve. If you want something, let us know post-haste (because they're also for sale on the interweb)! All new items sell for cover price, used items as marked. Sadly, trade credit cannot be used for new items.

Our books are always searchable via ABEbooks.

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We ran out of time on the descriptions this week and let our unrestrained Id write up these tomes while we slept!



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Sock Monkeys (200 out of 1,863), Arne Svenson and Ron Warren
(Paperback)

they eat sock bananas and other sock monkeys. mouths full of stuffing, they nightly cry sock tears and curse their monstrous maker.

($10) [Sold]

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Grindhouse: The Forbidden World of "Adults Only" Cinema, Eddie Muller and Daniel Faris, eds.
(Paperback, out of print)

dirty pictures. dirty moving pictures.

chase them.

catch them.

dirty dirty.

($15) [Sold]

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The Starry Wisdom: A Tribute to H.P. Lovecraft, D.M. Mitchell, ed.
(Paperback, out of print)

lesser talents offer tribute to a greater talent. W.S. Burroughs; Alan Moore; Grant Morrison; J.G. Ballard.

($20) [Sold]

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Ten Years of Italian Progress, Italian State Tourist Department.
(Stapled pamphlet, 1933)

fascists run the trains on time and produce purty pamphlets. but no one's fooled, mr. mussolini. you are the bad man.

($10)

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Psychedelic Prayers, Timothy Leary.
(Paperback, out of print)

each page better be soaked in blotter acid, at that price.

($35)

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Skyspace poetry!


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Everything's turning into a pile of shit.


Except this.

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Fakir!



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# of weeks since Spine and Crown inception: 189

# of weeks since inception that no mention of Spine and Crown has appeared in the print edition of The Stranger: 189

Saturday, June 13, 2009

T-R-O-U-B-L-E !

Every week, barring illness or indolence, we send another of these half-cracked cosmic thwaps out into the aether. Our letter soup bubbles up through your branch of the inter-tubes and, shockingly, some of you read it. Some of you even choose to comment on it. Anything we write that contains a trace of optimistism garners a big response. The rest is largely ignored, though it's inarguably truer and more clear-eyed.

Do that math.

Slow at math? So are we!

But what we think it adds up to is T-R-O-U-B-L-E! What is this obsession with happy endings? It's rough out there, we know. Boy howdy, do we know! And it's tempting to grasp at any straw of hope that's offered... But, honestly, this here is about the shortest and thinnest goddamn straw anyone ever grasped at!

Speaking personally, all of our comforts are stocked on the freezer aisle. We KNOW that Lassie is never coming home. Just like we know that if it was possible to levy a duty on breathing, we'd all be coughing up aspiration tax! And we know that all prospects for survival, over a sufficiently long span of time, fall to zero.















But amongst this unpleasantness remains the possibility of GLORY!!!! If not survival, then thrival! And legendary exploits leading to immortal mythical myths and legends of thrival! "Aye, now there was a bookshop!!!" they shout in the halls of Valhalla! And we're not even gone yet! Dead vikings are notoriously inept with verb tense. But we echo the sentiment!

Perhaps you do too, poor, doomed Spine and Crown customer. Come. Come revel in your transitory, ephemeral nowness! If you fall in battle tomorrow, will you be able to say you read enough? When the crone Fate, Atropos, severs the thread of your life, will you have helped us make enough of our mortgage payments? No, we think not. Come. Shop. Thrive!!!

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There was a secret hidden in last week's description of an Edmund Husserl book. A prize was offered to the first respondent, simply for noticing the offer of a prize. No one claimed the reward. And we will never reveal what it was. You snooze, you lose! We suggest reading this week's newsletter v-e-r-y carefully.

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This week:

All items mentioned below are first come, first serve. If you want something, let us know post-haste (because they're also for sale on the interweb)! All new items sell for cover price, used items as marked. Sadly, trade credit cannot be used for new items.

Our books are always searchable via ABEbooks.

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Hot, Sweet and Blue, Jack Baird.
(Paperback original, out of print)

She was tall and leggy with cloudy black hair, and she sang from inside her, the way Johnny blew his horn. They looked at each other and they never looked away.

But they reckoned without the fact that Lily was a Negro, and the time would come when the music had to stop...

This copy is as fresh as if it just walked off the drugstore spinner-rack, circa 1956.

A beauty!

($40)

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Artifact, Richard Hell.
(Paperback, out of print)

Sprung full-grown from the thighs of Francesco Clemente and Raymond Foye, Hanuman Books (48 titles, collect them all!) was an art/publishing project for the ages!

These ghouls, masquerading as publishers, would descend upon recently deceased authors and employ a ghastly machine, which they called a "metempsychosatron," to dissect their very brains, messily extracting unpublished, and in some cases, yet undreamt of, manuscripts from the stiffening wordsmiths.

When Richard Hell (Television, Voidoids) approached them volunteering to be their first live subject, Clemente and Foye balked, but only momentarily. Hell was left a twitching husk, but we have this book to remember him by! Clemente and Foye have returned to the pit which spawned them.

($60)

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The Incompleat Pogo, Walt Kelly.
(Paperback, out of print)

Seriously. Is Pogo the best American newspaper comic ever? Without it, no Calvin and Hobbes. Without it, no Bone. Without it, no movable type, cotton fiber, or sourdough bread! What was the world thinking, allowing this stuff to go out of print? Fantagraphics has some reprints scheduled, but they're years late, and Gary Groth told us a few months ago that the legal hassles delaying the whole project were unpredictable. Get these 1960s collections while we still have 'em!

($7) [Sold]


also available:

Potluck Pogo ($5) [Sold]
Pogo Sunday Parade ($9) [Sold]
Uncle Pogo So-So Stories ($3 - kind of falling apart, sadly) [Sold]






















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Batman: Year 100
, Paul Pope.
(Paperback)

A stylish, hip, libertarian Batman.

Huh?

Pope sez: "He's someone with the body of David Beckham, the brain of Nikola Tesla, and the wealth of Howard Hughes, who is pretending to be Nosferatu."

It's pretty good Batman.

($10) [Sold]

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Selected Letters of Stéphane Mallarmé
, Rosemary Lloyd, ed.
(Hardcover)

Devotee of Baudelaire, friend to Yeats, Rilke, and Verlaine.

to Léo d'Orfer, 27 June 1884

It's a real punch, momentarily blinding, that abrupt demand of yours: "Define Poetry." Bruised, I stutter:

Poetry is the expression, in human language restored to its essential rhythm, of the mysterious meaning of the aspects of existence: in this way it confers authenticity on our time on earth and constitutes the only spiritual task there is.

Farewell, but you owe me an apology.

-Mallarmé

($15) [Sold]

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Joshua Beckman at Open Books, June 16th

Joshua is a fine, fine poet- and an engaging, generous spirit, as well! It can only profit you to attend, and could potentially cause your limbs to wither should you choose not to!

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Everything's turning into a pile of shit.

Especially this.

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Goat tower!










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# of weeks since Spine and Crown inception: 188

# of weeks since inception that no mention of Spine and Crown has appeared in the print edition of The Stranger: 188

Sunday, June 07, 2009

Bipolar much?

"You are not required to complete the work, but neither are you allowed to desist from it."

That is a great, great quote from the Talmud. The followers of Jewish use that book as one of their holy books of most primary importance. It is very revered. Just so you know, we're down with the Jewish and their holy books. There were apparently a lot of wise old Jewish guys back in the day. It's great that even way back then, they had such knowledge and wisdom.

















But let's look closer at what they said. There is work, apparently. And there must be a lot of it, because people are thinking about desisting. People can be so lazy! But they can also work hard. They might burn the midnight oil and a candle at both ends. And what the wise Jewish old guys were telling us is that it's ok to want to desist. Lay down and rest. Now wake up, lazybones!

There is a lot of work to be done. Who knows what it is? The wise Jewish old guys didn't say. But look around. It won't take long to notice: There's work everywhere! Just living is work. If you didn't do any work at all and just laid down on the ground... well, all kinds of things would start to cart little pieces of you off and the sun would bake you and eventually only a stain on the sidewalk would show where you stopped working!
















If you're like us, you want to complete things. It's nice to see things all tied up. That's why the TV show Lost is a torture from the devil. But back in the old Jewish day, they knew already that all the lives of all the people made up something big. And all the lives of all the people and all the work they did and all the babies they made and raised made something bigger. Something that might go on for a long, long time. So long, that they wouldn't see the end of it. Lo and behold, they were right! And it's still going. And we won't see the end of it. Well, most likely, we won't see the end of it.

And there are no people on the moon. Not any more, anyway. And there are not people on Mars, Pluto, Donald, or Mickey, either. As far as we can tell, there are not people on the stars, either. Unless they're hiding. That makes it sort of a big deal to be a part of this thing that's so big but still so much smaller than everything that is not this thing.

If you work, some people will work against you. That's frustrating! Even if you just try to live and do that kind of minimal work, some people will try to work against that, too! People! What are you going to do? Work harder! Work and build things and vacuum the rug! Work with your hands and get dirt under your nails. Read blogs and buy books, too! But wash those mitts first, farmhands! We don't take no filthy yokels here at Spine and Crown! No shoes, no shirt, no service!

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This week:

All items mentioned below are first come, first serve. If you want something, let us know post-haste (because they're also for sale on the interweb)! All new items sell for cover price, used items as marked. Sadly, trade credit cannot be used for new items.

Our books are always searchable via ABEbooks.

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The Sixth Man
, Jess Stearn.
(Paperback, out of print)

"One out of every six men in America is a homosexual. This is the report of one of the most frightening surveys conducted since the Kinsey books."

The Kinsey books were frightening? Should have read Richard von Krafft-Ebing. Anyhow, people in 1962 had a lot more to worry about than homosexuals... Did they know Kennedy had less than two years left? Did they know that the Yankees would win the pennant? Did they know they only had twenty years until Cabbage Patch Kids? Stupid 1962 hicks.

($4) [Sold]

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The Golden Man, Philip K. Dick.
(Book club hardcover, out of print)

Intro, notes, and afterword by Dick. Sweet book club only package. Jacket's a little messy, but not one you see every day. See... you thought we were going to say, "not a Dick you see every day," but that kind of humor is beneath us. The guy was a talented writer with a very unfortunate last name. Do you think he asked to be named Dick? Show a little sensitivity! Maybe you'd like us to make fun of you! Internet-wits! Cyber-butts! Doesn't feel very good, does it?

($25)

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Sex Marchers, Jefferson Poland and Sam Sloan, eds.
(Hardcover, out of print)

Chapter titles:

"Picketing for Sex"
"What is Sexual Freedom?"
"Multiple Love"
"Support Your Local Pornographer"
"The Defenders of Skinny-Dipping"
"A Square Rally for Oral Sex"
and the ever popular
"Inside an Orgy"

The Sixties feel like a long, long time ago.

($25)

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Shorter Works, Edmund Husserl.
(Paperback)

Husserl stated that logic has three strata, each further away from consciousness and psychology than those that precede it.

* The first stratum is what Husserl called a "morphology of meanings" concerning a priori ways to relate judgments to make them meaningful. In this stratum we elaborate a "pure grammar" or a logical syntax, and he would call its rules "laws to prevent non-sense", which would be similar to what logic calls today "formation rules". Mathematics, as logic's ontological correlate, also has a similar stratum, a "morphology of formal-ontological categories".

* The second stratum would be called by Husserl "logic of consequence" or the "logic of non-contradiction" which explores all possible forms of true judgments. He includes here syllogistic classic logic, propositional logic and that of predicates. This is a semantic stratum, and the rules of this stratum would be the "laws to avoid counter-sense" or "laws to prevent contradiction". They are very similar to today's logic "transformation rules". Mathematics also has a similar stratum which is based among others on pure theory of pluralities, and a pure theory of numbers. They provide a science of the conditions of possibility of any theory whatsoever. Husserl also talked about what he called "logic of truth" which consists of the formal laws of possible truth and its modalities, and precedes the third logical third stratum.

* The third stratum is metalogical, what he called a "theory of all possible forms of theories." It explores all possible theories in an a priori fashion, rather than the possibility of theory in general. If you have read this far, you win a prize. The first person to send us an email will claim it. We could establish theories of possible relations between pure forms of theories, investigate these logical relations and the deductions from such general connection. The logician is free to see the extension of this deductive, theoretical sphere of pure logic.

($35) [Sold]

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Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett.
(Hardcover, dual language)

Waiting for Godot? Wait no more! He's here! In a nice, shiny hardcover! And what a Godot he is! Worth the wait, for sure! Extra silky super fragrant Godot! What?! Mr. Godot didn't arrive? It's a disaster! Hand me that belt! (Makes a noose; tests the strength of a tree branch.) What kind of tree is this? (Messenger arrives from Godot.) Says he'll be here tomorrow! Come back then!

($12) [Sold]

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extraordinary art by Erica Sherman
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David Lynch's Interview Project

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Everything's turning into a pile of shit.


Except this.

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Witch Bottle Found in London


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# of weeks since Spine and Crown inception: 187

# of weeks since inception that no mention of Spine and Crown has appeared in the print edition of The Stranger: 187