St. Remedius Medical College: "A Eulogy and Possible Diatribe on Mendellosian Books"

(Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?)

Of the many assocated businesses and locales frequented by St. Remedius Medical College students, faculty, consultants, and detractors, probably the most-missed was the famed Mendellosian Books & Esoterica store, spreading across all four floors of 1922 Greenville Avenue in Dallas. Much like classic bookstores in cities on each coast, visits to the Mendellosian flagship store were proud pilgrimages for those studying the exonormal, but several branch stores specializing in metaphysics, advanced technology, biology, and culinary arts spread through the Southwestern United States were worthy of their own visits, perusings, and stripping of cash reserves and credit card limits.

When the original store opened in 1960, it and its subsequent offshoots (including the San Antonio locale sequestered in the Alamo, with the famed downstairs staircase leading to it just past the Tomb of the Unknown Bowie) bore the name “Hyperborean Books” as a tribute to an influential series of short stories from the 1930s. By the mid-1990s, though, the term “hyperborean” had been appropriated by white supremacists and other maladapts to the point where phone queries about available books were often described as “Conversational Ichthyostegid,” and the staff acknowledged that a name change was in order.

While tempted by the opportunity to mock unwanted visitors with “Bohab Books,”the decision in 1996 went with the Old English word for the eternal conflict between remaining inside to study versus getting outside in the fresh air, and the new sign for Mendellosian Books went up in mid-April, alongside an exhibition of carnivorous plant blooms on the front porch from the garden group The Manchester United Flower Show. Until its sudden liquidation in the wake of St. Remedius’s disappearance, Mendellosian Books never faltered in pushing the balance between study and fresh air, often conducting book sales at local art fairs, arboretum shows, and the occasional bicycle race. This even went international with a series of radio and television ads in the late 1980s featuring owner Sylvia Strassord, with the tagline “Say it. Say it right. Then go do it.” T-shirts and gift cards featuring that tagline and Sylvia’s autograph now command higher prices with collectors of the curious than almost everything else the stores sold.

One of the reasons for Mendellosian Books’s success was with what it didn’t carry instead of what it carried. In the age where every barely functional pagan supply shop and junk collection carried multiple copies of the Cliff’s Notes for The Revelations of Glaaki, carrying rare and exotic books full of forbidden knowledge just encouraged shoplifting and the occasional break-in, and the goofballs walking in insisting upon getting a copy of Al-Azif in the original Arabic were gently asked to check with their local essential oil purveyors and anime convention crystal dealers. Instead, Mendellosian Books offered the reference materials for those rare exotic books: 17th Century herbals, histories on monastery libraries and workshops, and grammar guides for understanding medieval Greek and Tatar, Classic Maya, and Vuun etched zircons. It carried multiple copies of the classic How To Keep Your Timeship Alive: A Manual of Step By Step Procedures For The Compleat Novice, if only for the steady stream of temporal castaways who had the necessary sponge platinum to replicate a neutron ram but needed the underlying theory to make it work. Surprising to many, Mendellosian Books also carried a wide selection of books exceedingly skeptical of much of its inventory. This was less on the idea of “giving equal time” than on pure economics, such as the number of books on psychic and emotional vampires that sold best to psychic and emotional vampires looking for affirmation and dating tips.

While not letting the stores get crowded, Mendellosian Books locations carried a wide range of associated materials, also for the discerning student instead of wannabes and their entourages. While best known for its line of emerald, sapphire, and ruby helenite daggers for hermetic projection, as well as protection from the entities haunting the angles of space-time, it also carried a wide range of new, gently used, and inherited rings, wands, braziers, clockwhirls, neuronets, and sacrificial anodes, many with extensive verified histories from Zwinge Foundation analysts. In not-so-serious offerings, Mendellosian Books also offered exclusive collector boxes of the revived “Cryptids” breakfast cereal from the 1970s, as well as complete and partial sets of the figures offered in every box from 1973 to 1976. It even was the sole source for the fad alien abductionist buttons reading “Let’s Get Probed!” that were the rage in 1988.

Sadly, after the chain’s liquidation, no other contender stepped in to offer the same levels of accessibility and affordability, with most online sales of tecpatls and athames allegedly from Mendellosian stockpiles consisting of third-party counterfeits and caveat emptor case studies. Rumor has it that one last warehouse full of then-new inventory awaits an auction and liqudation sale, but a previous rumor merely led to a room full of chunks of the fence from Dallas’s Dealey Plaza grassy knoll. Meanwhile, the name, logo, and related intellectual property remains registered with a mysterious LLC, regularly igniting hopes that it might return at a time of its greatest need.

Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. Questions, concerns, and disgust over generative AI? Check out Contact, Privacy Policy, and AI Policy. And feel free to visit the St. Remedius Medical College Redbubble shop for all of your Mandatory Parker needs.

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