Barnes & Noble is returning to Georgetown. As Washingtonian reports:
"Barnes & Noble is having a renaissance. Under new CEO James Daunt, the bookstore chain is doing away with its cookie-cutter spaces stuffed with board games and toys, and giving its business model a new focus—books. The strategy: to make each existing and forthcoming location feel like a hyperlocal indie bookshop. Among B&N’s 50 new branches is a three-story Georgetown store, which in October will reopen in the very same building it was displaced from more than a decade ago… While the new location will still sell vinyl and stationery, the fresh B&N model leans into creative, locally focused curation of books as its main moneymaker. A team of mostly DC-area locals has been hired to run the Georgetown store, and management has artistic liberty to 'add the local flavor' and curate content 'based on what they think is important for the community,' says B&N spokesperson Janine Flanigan."
As of this writing, my own book—which is set in D.C. and has many key scenes take place in Georgetown—isn’t available at any Barnes & Noble store in the D.C. area. The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs the New American Stasi is the 2022 book I wrote about the 2018 nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. I was targeted by criminals, extortionists, and people making false claims because I’d gone to high school with Kavanaugh. They accused us of everything from keg parties to gang rape, went through our high school yearbook, and tried to put Kavanaugh next to me when I was at my wildest in the Reagan era. The political left tried to destroy him and, as Jonathan Turley put it on Fox, I was supposed to be “roadkill” in the process.
For the past few years I’ve been roasting the cowards at places like Politics and Prose and the Washington Post for neglecting to carry or review The Devil’s Triangle. My case is ironclad: My grandfather arrived in Washington, D.C. in 1915 to play professional baseball for the Washington Senators. His son, my father, spent a career at National Geographic. My brother Michael won the Helen Hayes Award for the Best Actor in Washington. The Spectator, in describing me and Washington, called me “the city incarnate.” I went to Catholic University in D.C, met my loves in D.C., worked in the restaurants and bars and shops here. In 2018, I was a pivotal figure in a Washington drama. The Washington Post can’t mention me?
In his recent book The Washington Book: How to Read Politics and Politicians, 20-year Post veteran Carlos Lozada reads all the books and other documents about Washington. These are political memoirs, government documents, Supreme Court decisions: “I read histories and manifestos,” Lozada writes. “I peruse centuries-old essays and decades-old commission reports. I scour Supreme Court decisions and the text of the latest congressional investigations. I read many books about American politics l, and, I must confess, I also read books by politicians and government officials.” Lozada reads campaign biographies, “revisionist memoirs,” the “tell-all books by mid-level administration staffers,” and books by “presidents, vice presidents, senators, chiefs of staff and FBI directors.” If it had anything to do with D.C., Lozada reads it. Except The Devil’s Triangle.
If the new Barnes & Noble in Georgetown doesn’t carry The Devil’s Triangle, we’ll reach a new level of absurdity—and anti-capitalism. Georgetown is where Kavanaugh me and our friends hung out in the 1980s as high schoolers and then when coming home from college. Garrett’s, our favorite bar, was across the street from the Barnes & Noble. We raised a toast to Kavanaugh at Garrett’s and then walked over to the church when his wedding ceremony took place, which is also in Georgetown. In one key scene in my book, I’m driving down M Street past the old Barnes & Noble talking to my lawyer on the phone.
In one of the flashbacks in my book, I describe going down to Georgetown University in the summer of 1982 with my skateboard as a high school student to meet with Father Hart, a great Jesuit who’d taught Kavanaugh and me at Georgetown Prep. I loved Father Hart. After lunch on the roof of the Jesuit residence looking out over the Potomac River, I rode my board down to Kemp Mill Records and then to Poseurs, the New Wave club that played Cure songs that I liked. As an adult I taught journalism at Georgetown University for three summers. My grandfather Joe Judge, the baseball player, coached at Georgetown for 20 years. He’s in the Georgetown University Hall of Fame.
So how about it, Barnes & Noble? You want hyperlocal, you got it. The new store launches in October, right at the time SCOTUS starts its session.
