Remembrances

This article first appeared in 2007



An online T-shirt company is pressing onto T-shirts the faces and quotes of the world`s most renowned novelists, poets, philosophers and dramatists.

Literary Rags sell their T-shirts at www.literaryrags.com. LitRags has over 100 authors to choose from, but plans on adding a staggering two hundred others in the future. "Currently, we have a nice array of choices", says company founder, Dave Richardson, there is someone for everyone, but we want to continue to add writers because there's been so many great thinkers throughout history."

literaryrags.com has been operating for several years and feels their website and the quality of their product shows with satisfied customers. "We use only the highest quality T-shirts," says Richardson, "that has been our idea from the beginning - we didn`t want to use poor quality T-shirts just to keep the cost down. We want the customer to be extremely happy with the quality."

literaryrags.com market their T-shirts primarily through popular literary blogs, and have seen a wide range of customers. "It`s been interesting and fun," says Richardson, "we get e-mails and guest book entries from people of all walks of life," he adds. LitRags has always believed that literature and the love of great authors is still very much alive in today`s hi-tech world.

Literary Rags realizes that there are other T-shirt companies out there that dabble in some of the more well known authors, but feel what separates them is the company`s exclusivity to literature and the uncommon list of authors. "What makes your site so different is the unique selection of authors," said Levi Asher of LitKicks.com.

Once asked what makes Literary Rags different, Richardson answered, "They are simply T-shirt people with an occasional literary endeavor, and we are constant literary people with a T-shirt endeavor."

I remember the night passing through Lowell, Mass., the birthplace of Jack kerouac, like it was yesterday. It was a warm summer night, and I was driving around thinking that I would see signs everywhere telling where this had happened and that had happened. But none of that was there; in fact, I stopped at a red light and asked a young couple where Jack kerouac's grave was, and they said "who?"
I eventually found a 7-11 and just asked person after person until someone knew. I also stumbled upon this little park tucked beneath the shadows of an old textile mill turned apartment building, with these looming monoliths inscribed with samples of Jack's work -- I loved just sitting there on the bench; it was after midnight and nobody was around, and it was that late summer-night quiet, and I had a beer in a bag, and I felt like singing.
After that I drove around looking for a bar where Jack might have hung out, but everyone seemed vague and uninterested, and after many whiskies with 8 oz. glass tap-beer chasers, the kind you can only find in old neighborhood saloons, I finally got tired and just hit the Lowell Connector and left the famed Merrimack behind.