THAT’S the one I’m looking for!
Those are words that a bookseller loves to hear. Someone stopping in to look for a specific title – something written years ago – and, against the odds finding it on the shelf. There are so, so many titles.
I’ve been around books all my life, but before getting into the business of selling books, I had no idea that so many authors had written so many books. Not having been a reader of series fiction in my younger years, I naively thought that an author wrote a book or two and then rested on their laurels. (I understand that’s the part of the anatomy that grows larger from big royalty checks and sitting at the keyboard. I could be wrong.)
It turns out, there are some writers that must be writing twenty and thirty hours a day to crank out so many titles. James Patterson, for one.
To keep ALL those books in stock would take a store the size of Texas and an army of employees to keep them organized and alphabetized. Honestly – no store can stock all the books. No can do.
So, it is somewhat of a rarity when an older title is on the shelf just waiting for its new owner. We’re talking about those books that even the big-boy Barnes & Noble has to special order (and charge full cover price for…).
There are some categories that I have a pretty good shot at fulfilling a request. American and English literature, for example. I try to keep the classics in stock, even to the point of ordering them in new to have copies on the shelf. For genre fiction like suspense, mystery, and fantasy – it is just impossible. Even in the currently popular George R.R. Martin series “Game of Thrones” that has been brought to life on Showtime, there are more titles than I can stock in new copies.
This afternoon, I had several satisfying moments. In fact, the majority of the requests today were in stock, and available in nice clean used copies that saved the buyers a little money.
I like that.
Until the store grows to the size of Texas I’ll just take pride in those occasions where my selection of books has satisfied a specific need.
Maybe I’ll brush up on my fortune telling to better know what to stock.