Origin Story

Stacey and Winston getting ready to hear Neil Gaiman present at the Edmonton Public Library’s Forward Thinking speaker series, November 13, 2018.

Why Butterflies & Aliens? Well, the short answer is because www.catching-butterflies-and-shark-attack-victims.com was too long.

Now, to explain what that has to do with anything, we need to go further back to when our two founders, Stacey Kondla and Winston Pei, both fresh out of high school, met at a Halloween party. If memory serves, it went something like this:

Winston: “Hey, cool, you’re a lepidopterist!”

Stacey: “You’re the only person here who’s figured that out. And what exactly are you?”

Winston: “A shark attack victim. You couldn’t tell?”

And thus began a friendship born of nerdiness and copious amounts of fake blood, but sustained by a shared love of science fiction, domestic pets, pop culture, and all things bookish.

So when much later the opportunity arose to do… something… together, the first step was to pick a name and stake out some virtual territory. As mentioned before, www.catchingbutterfliesandsharkattackvictims.com was too long. After much brainstorming (and possibly some wine), butterfliesandaliens.com was chosen and registered.

More time passed… and more time passed…

And here we are now, January 1, 2021, launching the Butterflies & Aliens Library of Literary Eccentricities and Rarities, to celebrate our shared delight and curiosity in books, about books, over books.

Happy reading!

– Stacey and Winston