Oedipus & the Sphinx - 2

And again, this is true.

Seriously, you can't make this stuff up...

Merry Christmas!

Canto XI - The River Lethe

Okay. Here comes a customer: they look slightly dazed but happy, as if they’re in the aftermath of some light head trauma. They wander up to the front counter with that “Oh how sweet: a place that sells books!” look on their face, and they turn to address you. You can expect that they will be looking for:

A) Your assistance in finding a gift for someone you've never even met;

B) A book about which they've forgotten every pertinent detail;

C) A book on a topic that they've heard someone talking about, but about which they have no clue; or

D) Something that doesn't even exist. 

We’ve covered “A” and “B” in previous posts, but the other options raise new wrinkles in dealing with the lightly insane, ie. people who buy books (that “s” in “insane” is strictly optional, by the way. Use it; drop it; as you see fit).

Option “C” occurs whenever the punter has had a thrilling session with a companion or acquaintance wherein a topic of seeming import has arisen. They will hurry away to your shop afterwards and – using the mere skerricks of information that they’ve retained – try to purchase suitable reading matter in order to appear fully conversant at the next encounter.

“I want a book all about a famous German philosopher of the 17^th Century,” they’ll say, to which you will reply - with some justification I might note – “which one?”

Reeling off a list of names will serve no purpose because, of the minimal gleanings the customer has remembered from the discussion, details like names, dates and titles will not number amongst them. Instead, words like “sublime”, or “excellent”, or phrases like “very deep”, or “truly insightful”, will have stuck and this is what the cretin has summoned forth for you to work with.

With perseverance and great restraint you will finally pin down the likely work to be Immanuel Kant’s A Critique of Pure Reason, written by him in the 1700s; however, when you airily note that he was actually Prussian, the sale will stop dead in its tracks. What little information they have is unshakable in its Truth: they may have heard “17^th Century” and not “1700s” but that’s all that they’ll give you. If you’re lucky they will walk out the door with an “adorable” copy of Lamb’s Tales From Shakespeare instead, as recompense for having wasted your life, but don’t count on it.

Option “D” is quite similar, but it derives from the sinister quagmire that is talk radio. Whilst driving, or gardening, or lacquering the cat, the punter will have heard a reference to something that appeals to them – a forthcoming TV show, or a movie that’s being made, or a work upon which a writer is currently making progress. Inevitably, they will walk immediately down to your store and ask for it. I once had a customer ask me for the “new Monty Python DVD” moments after they heard an interview with Terry Jones and Eric Idle, in which the two of them vaguely mused that another Python film wasn’t out of the question. And who copped flak for gently talking the customer off this particular ledge? You guessed it.

Sometimes it’s just that the topic about which they’ve come to you in search of enlightenment is so obscure that no-one has written anything about it: “the Cicada life-cycle in New South Wales’s Blue Mountains”, “Brazing in the early Sydney Colony”, “Railway Upholstery in the British Indian Holdings”. Your gentle suggestion that perhaps the customer is the person who should be turning the sod on this particular field is always met with a derisive sniff.

The customer’s preconceptions get in the way with this line of inquiry also. I was once asked for a book on the medical and household uses of garden weeds in Australia. Now, we have a bunch of books that discuss this topic – everything from treating medical infirmities to dyeing, with only the plants ready-to-hand in your backyard. But no: the punter wanted a book about using “weeds”, not “plants”. After trying to point out that the word “weed” is simply gardener’s jargon for a plant not where it ought to be, I got the derisive sniff and a look that indicated that I was some kind of mental deficient. What can you do?

Bad as all this is, there are many times that it gets worse. By starting their inquiry without accurate information, credible details, or any type of basic research, and then - after discovering that you’re unable to provide them with what they want - treating you like you’re some kind of failure, they ask if there’s anything close to what they’re after. Something in the ballpark, as it were. With an Herculean effort you provide a solid fall-back option, and place it in front of them for their consideration. That’s when they drop the other shoe:

They’ve also forgotten their glasses.

(Focus, people! For Christ’s sake: focus!)

Canto X - The Glassy Plain

Recently I attended an examination of a private collection of books with a view to making purchases for the shop. The seller had an impressive array of titles – mainly history and large art books – some of which attract very healthy prices in the secondhand market. Along with these were a very nice range of classic literature titles, hardcovers dating from the 30s and 40s which are excellent for padding out the classics department. As it turned out, despite the presence of over 50 boxes of these offerings, we walked away with very little.

Why? Almost every single book was covered in adhesive plastic.

There are some who think that adhesive plastic – most often marketed under the brand name ConTact® – is a boon to collectors, and to libraries, where books are worked hard for their contents, this may be the case. However here’s a definition for you:

*****

damage /’dæmıdzh (noun): 1. Injury or harm which impairs value or usefulness; 2. (in bibliophily) anything which removes a book from its original state.

*****

People who sell books for their value as objects – not simply for their contents – regard adhesively plasticized volumes as irreparably damaged, and of little worth. Simply put, as far as book collectors go, ConTact® is the work of the Devil. If, for example, you ordered a book online from a secondhand or antiquarian bookdealer and it showed up covered in the demon plastic, you would be well within your rights to demand your money back – unless their description of the book explicitly stated the presence of the hellish material. Some dealers don’t care about ConTact®; some care so little that they forget to mention it, considering the stuff a useful addition to the book’s structure and integrity. These are not dealers with whom you should do business.

When dealing with rare books, the term “Fine” (or the hideous misnomer, “Mint”) declares that the book is new and unused – in the exact state which you would expect if you bought it off the shelf in a new bookstore. In secondhand and rare bookdealing, if a book isn’t “Fine”, the reasons why it isn’t must be explicitly stated; otherwise, someone’s trying to sell you a pup. Anything done to a book to “protect” it, or repair it, is classed as “damage” in the trade and it should be noted in the book’s description.

Non-adhesive plastic is available and widely used, even by those who eschew ConTact® in all its Satanic forms. It is a worthy addition to a book’s integrity and will extend its life, or the life of its dustwrapper; however, it too, must be noted in the description.

Remember: adhesive plastic is for school books and library books (which is why the term “Ex-Library” is considered so poisonous in the book trade). Don’t stick it on your precious collectibles! Let them breathe!

Canto IX - The Impasse

There is one eternal truism that takes place in the world of selling books – and, I assume, other areas of retail activity also – that is as annoying as it is unavoidable: wherever you need to work in the shop, on a matter of highest priority, that is where the largest, most obtuse and slab-like customer will choose to stand.

Imagine it: you’ve just cleared a window display and have assembled the new books to be moved into that space. When you arrive at the now-empty window, there will be someone standing there – most likely with a backpack, or with many bags of shopping – idly flipping through some book that they’ve just randomly pulled off a shelf. So, unwilling to disturb this punter in the process of making a sale, you dump your armful of books and decide to give them a few moments.

When you return, they’ve not only cozied themselves into the area in which you need to work, but they’ve also begun to set down roots, arranging their impedimenta comfortably around them and burying their nose deeper into the volume that’s caught their attention. So, grinding your teeth, you disappear once more into the bowels of the shop, pretending to ignore the passing parade of people who might be lured into the premises but for the lack of a cheery and engaging window display to hook them in.

You give the browser a few more minutes of your time, but really, there’s only so many times in a fifteen-minute period that you can realistically check your e-mails or shuffle the stationery at the front desk. So, girding your loins, you approach the customer once more.

By now, they’ve started to meld into the furniture, bleeding into the carpet tiles and sending vines and runners out over the entire shop. You notice that they’re seriously reading the tome, licking their fingers as they turn pages and shoving fingers into the Notes section at the back to cross-reference the citations.

“Hi!” you say brightly. “Great book, huh?”

They lift their head and peer at you blearily, with a faint air of annoyance at your temerity in dragging them back from some reverie. “Oh. Hmmm...” they will say and try to dive back in once more.

But you’re not having any of it. Phrases like “Buy it or Beat it!” come to mind and hover about your lips, or the old stand-by: “Buddy, it ain’t a library!” However, you’re mindful that a sale might still come from this.

“Would you like me to wrap that for you, so you can take it home and really get into it?” you try, with a fixed smile. That’s when they drop the clanger:

“Oh, no: I’m just waiting for my bus...”

‘Unceremoniously Ejected’ is the polite version of ‘Being Tossed Out On Your Arse’. You will probably never see that particular customer again but, in the short term, you will feel so much better...

Oedipus & the Sphinx...

I’ve been wrestling with this notion for awhile and trying to put it into some sort of context which would make sense. I guess the best way to explain it is to describe the incident which happened recently at the shop which brought the annoyance into sudden focus.

Picture the scene: I’m at work doing the things I need to do. A dapper, older fellow comes in looking self-satisfied and smirky (I was getting a bad vibe off him right from the outset). Standing there, hands in pockets, bouncing on the balls of his feet, he says:

“You won’t have this, but I’m going to ask anyway – do you have a copy of Rabelais?”

Well, just that week, we had taken possession of a nice old set of Rabelais’ Complete Works in two quarto volumes, translated by Urquhart and Motteux and illustrated by Papé, in an early edition, unusual for still having the dustwrappers. I duly produced them and allowed the customer to peruse.

“Right,” he said, fumbling for his wallet, “I need a copy to demonstrate a few things to my students, so I’ll just take the one volume – that should be enough.”

Imagine his annoyance when I told him that it’s a single work in two volumes – he would need to take both, or none at all.

“But I don’t need both! And lugging two books is just awkward!”

I steadily explained: it’s not two books; it’s one book in two volumes. Take one from the other and you are left with something of no value to anyone.

“Well,” he said, “I shan’t be buying it from you then.” And he left in a huff.

Now, I’m making both of us sound more unreasonable than we actually were in this exchange, but the essence is there. After he left, I had a bit of an epiphany.

It’s this: academics suck. They – intrinsically – value the contents of books, instead of the books themselves. They will dog-ear pages, inscribe marginal notes and underline, and stuff a book with all kinds of bookmarks from chocolate bar wrappers to those god-awful plastic flags that poke out from the text block and are a bitch to remove. In short, in career terms, they and I exist as polar opposites.

(It’s not that I disregard a book’s contents at all, if that’s what you’re thinking. I just think of the contents – which may be a swiggable wine, or a fine vintage, depending – as being carried in an exquisite container, one that should be of as much account as that which it carries. As Omar Khayyam says:

“...Why ne’er a peevish Boy,

Would break the Bowl from which he drank in Joy;

Shall He that made the Vessel in pure Love

And Fancy, in an after Rage destroy!”)

Academics become lost in their own little worlds, which narrow immeasurably down to what they study, who they work with (and the politics that go with it) and the materials they need to go about their business. At some point they assume de facto ownership of all works which impinge upon their area of speciality and get bewildered when they find a book – a book! – which is outside their price range, or is not in a format that they’d prefer.

“But,” they splutter, “it’s just a copy of Plato! Why is it $100?!” And I explain exactly why and they still treat me as though I’m a parent in a candy store, telling them that they can look but don’t touch.

I get it. Academia is increasingly cutthroat; there are too many people on the planet and they all have to have degrees to get on in life. Defending your academic patch is a full-time job before you even start writing your thesis. Most people in the world are content to just go to university, snag that bit of paper and the sprinkle of letters after their name, and get on with things; those who stay in academia become the very little rulers of tiny little castles. And they develop an ENORMOUS sense of entitlement to go along with it.

This often reveals itself by the fact that somewhere in the conversation, the academic will try and steer things to their particular bailiwick and then try to accuse you of not knowing anything. Anything at all. I’ve met academics outside of work and they always want to know what I do, right off the bat; afterwards they sneer and affect great world-weariness as they start to tell me of the difficulties they have with their students, or their magnum opus, or their wrestling with the works of Foucault or Barthes. It’s exactly the same kind of boring tripe that unloads in front of you when someone tries to tell you about the dream they had last night; or the acid trip they took last week. There are two smells that occasionally waft off people which guarantee that they will be regarded as utter turds – desperation and self-aggrandisement.

Just to hammer this home (and, dangerously, to dabble on the fringes of self-aggrandisement myself), my Wednesday night pub trivia team is composed only of booksellers: none of us are career academics, or particularly beholden to academia. Most of the other teams are composed of tertiary level students, or academics, past and present. We win every Wednesday. Every. Wednesday. Sometimes only a couple of us can show up: we still win. Sometimes only one of us can make it: we still win. We’re kind of wondering how long the pub will continue running this gig actually, because a $50 bar tab each week certainly mounts up. And each of us has an anecdote about how some jumped-up, single-focus, book-banger told us that we are “just booksellers and couldn’t possibly be expected to understand, blah, blah, blah...”

And so, I’ve come to think of this arrangement that I have with academics as akin, or symbolised by, the relationship Oedipus had with the Sphinx. The Academic is Oedipus – wrong-headed, wrong-footed, head full of expectations and the answers to obscure riddles; on the other hand, I am the Sphinx. I have the accumulated wisdom of the ages at my fingertips: if you want access, you jump through MY hoops.

And say “please”.

Canto VIII - The Well-packed Plateau of the Shelf-Stuffers

It is a central plank of various theories of physics that matter cannot co-exist in the exact same space. That is, two objects cannot occupy the same physical point in the universe. This being said, browsers in bookshops never seem to stop trying to test or de-bunk this theory.

Bookshelves are made for books. Some are adjustable in order to accommodate various different sizes of tome, from sextodecimo up to folio; others are of fixed dimensions. Nevertheless, some people always try to put more books on a shelf than the shelf can physically hold. And after attempting to do this, these people applaud themselves for having stuffed more bound paper than ever into the space provided.

They’re missing the point: a stuffed shelf is not to be lauded; clean, unbroken books are the point here. That’s what the shelf is for. Focus on the books people, not the furniture.

When a bookshelf is overstuffed it becomes a deadly book trap. The next person to haul a volume off the shelf will likely do one of several things: tear the dustwrapper; rip the spine-head; tear the hinges; or crack the spine. As well, the book gets crushed: the spine is put under extreme pressure from either side and it will crumple, leading to warping of the boards or rolling of the text block.

On top of this, books in a bunch create their own micro-climate. They breathe and de-humidify the air around them and they share microbes and bacteria (much like people do in a group – don’t get sniffy). Leather keeps its condition longer; paper stops becoming brittle: in short, it’s good to keep books together. They like it.

But there can be too much of a good thing. Take this test: approach your bookshelf and extend a finger to the head of the spine of a random book; now pull back gently rocking the book out on its spine heel a short way; then let go. If your book falls neatly back into place, then your shelves are fine; if it remains in position, or you cannot actually pull it out without some degree of force, then your shelves are over-stocked and you need to make some room.

Whenever people come into the shop where I work in order to sell books, I can tell at once the state of their bookshelves at home: everything they have to offer is torn, chipped, rolled, and bent. I’ve even worked in bookshops where the instructions from on high were to stuff as many units into the shelves as possible, because we could then pounce on someone tearing a squeezed book and force them to buy it (not many of us working there chose to enact this regulation, it has to be said). I’m no saint either: before I started to look at books as objects rather than just sources of information I used to cram volumes myself. Nowadays, I use the ‘tilt test’ outlined above.

Do your books a favour: let them breathe a little.

Canto VII - The Shady Vale of the Bookjackers...

“Bookjacking” is a term that most people will never have heard of, and that’s okay because it’s a very recent phenomenon. Most people however, who have an interest in books or who have bought books online, will have encountered them.

To begin with, I’m not talking about single-entity online booksellers such as the Book Depository or any particular bookshop’s purpose-built website; I’m talking about those web-based gathering houses which take everybody’s online presence and shows you who’s got the book you want for the price you’re willing to pay – places like ABEBooks, or Amazon, or Alibris, or AddAll, or Books & Collectibles. In and of themselves, these providers aren’t shady operators, but it’s at their sites that the bookjackers – like nasty little burrowing parasites – have made their home.

Bookjackers in short are online scammers. Here’s how it works. Say ABE has a book listed by a bookseller for $25 and this book is the only one listed at that site. The Bookjacker’s software identifies this title and then posts it, at a greatly inflated price – say, $80 to $100 – at Amazon or one of the other gathering sites. Soon other bookjackers follow suit, and suddenly a $25 book is being sold for stupid amounts of money at multiple sites. When an unknowing punter takes the bait, the ‘jacker buys the book from the original lister and forwards it on (maybe!) while pocketing the difference. Recent times have seen print-on-demand titles for $30 being re-sold for over a million dollars, simply because the ‘jacking process is automated and gets a little buggy when not monitored by human agents.

How do you spot a bookjacker? Shop around. If a book looks a little iffy wherever you find it, look on another site and see what it’s doing there. Look out for generic descriptions – “may have a dustwrapper if originally issued with one”, “may have minor wear and scratches”, “hundreds of satisfied customers!” – these encouraging pseudo-endorsements are designed to suck you in. To be really sure, contact the bookseller – the main benefit of these gathering sites is that they allow you to gain direct access the retailer so that you can ask about your purchase: no bookjacker is going to want to get chummy over a book that they don’t actually own.

The final check is the price. If the book you want can be found at another site with a price tag at least 50% lower than anywhere else, you’ve probably found the poor little tome that’s been ‘jacked.

Be assured that the big websites are doing what they can to identify and purge the thieves. In the meantime, many solo operators are banding together to “name and shame” the troublemakers. Here’s a list that’s a work in progress (and probably going to get much longer):

academic_book_guy

ADONAI BOOKS

amctj

anstinbooks

Any Book

BookGroveMedia

Book Deals

Book Smart

Booked Again

Books_Care

BookSleuth

BRILANTI BOOKS

Brooke Books

Castle Rock
Cloud 9 Books 
Colibris

CONTINENTAL MEDIA & BEYOND

Crashing Rocks

DailyDeal USA

East West Academic Books

elitedigital
Ergodebooks

ExtremelyReliable

fast-track-books

FishandSave

forest_of_wisdom
GlassFrogBooks
HPB - Blue
HPB - Diamond
HPB - Ruby  

International Books

jason_kurt

joypros

kime_enterprises

KingsRidgeMedia

lana's Shop

lance books

Lost Books

metropole_press

Migna Book Store

Murray Media

MyGrandmasGoodies

myrockland

nearfine-us

NOHINSA BOOKS

nuggetbooks33

OTTAPLACKAL BOOKS

Park Place Products

planet_books

profnath

Quality7

relationship

shopbychoice

soundtrack

southlandplace

Summit Read

technobookshop

the_book_community

thebookgrove

TOTAL BOOKS

TSCBOOKS

Vault Media

UCAEDU70

US_Bookseller

Vault Media

Woody's Books

worldreaders

Wisepenny Books

And rest assured that, if this is going on with booksellers, it’s happening with places like E-Bay and Etsy and with other types of collectibles like vinyl records and DVDs. Teh Interwebz can be a wonderful place; just remember that there are a lot of dickheads out there...

Canto VI - The Slough of Stupidity...

There it is: you’re having a great time. You’ve set up your shop to face another working day; you’ve had your first coffee of the morning; the sun is shining; birds are singing; you’re ready to greet your first customer with grace and equanimity. And here they come:

They smile and approach the shop-counter; they look around themselves in seeming wonder; and then they breathlessly say:

“Wow! Have you read all of these books?”

Boom! Thunder rolls; birds splat on the pavement having been struck by lightning; the sun disappears like someone turned off the switch; the coffee grumbles in the pit of your stomach. You twitch your upper lip into a sneer:

“Why, yes,” you say, “yes - I have. There’s not much work involved in selling books so I have to fill up all that time somehow.”

“Gosh,” they exclaim, looking around wide-eyed, and, if they’re really stupid, they go on to say, “it must be so much fun to work in a blah, blah, blah, blah, blah...”

(See: Canto I – The Waystation of the Ignorant.)

If you’re feeling particularly blunt-instrument-y, you might answer with the much more direct:

“What do you think?”

In this case, they back away, still smiling, just a little more fixedly, like a bunny in the headlights, feeling that something is expected of them and that they’re not going to like it, no matter how it turns out. And it turns out badly.

Boom!

Spoiler Alert!

We have this image on display at work and it gets a lot of attention. Everyone who sees it, gasps in amazement and then says something along the lines of “you can’t keep a good reader down!”, or “that’s resilience for you”. It seems to create a spirit of camaraderie amongst fellow readers and this hearkens back to things I was saying earlier about how people in bookshops somehow feel like they’re all part of some big secret community.

In fact, you might have clapped eyes on this image a few seconds ago and had similar feelings and thoughts about it. If you’d like to take away those warm and fuzzy notions with you, then you should leave now.

...

Have you gone yet? This is your last chance.

...

Okay, this is really your last chance to skip on to something else. Seriously, I’m about to ruin whatever you might think about what these guys are up to.

...

Okay. Now that the only people left reading are the tough-minded cynical types, I can reveal to you that these fellows are insurance assessors totting up their company’s pay-out after a bomb went through their client’s shop. Yep, despite appearances, nothing but cold, hard, finance happening here.

If you were wanting a sentimental, Blitz-based image celebrating the do-or-die adherence of readers to their hobby, look at this instead:

Canto V - The Sharp Defile of the Defilers...

Sometimes books get so worn and damaged that they no longer serve any purpose. They can’t be re-sold; they can no longer be read. Sometimes they just lose their pertinence, like an old encyclopaedia – time and research stand still for no-one. I see books like this all the time and, there’s no way that I can buy them for re-sale at the store – they’ve been read into the ground.

What to do with them? Tragic as I find it, sometimes books need to go to the recycling facility and be returned to the great cycle of literary proliferation. It’s sad, but it’s better than burning or burying them. My job, as I see it, is to keep books in circulation for as long as possible, to stave off the inevitable.

Unfortunately, there is a sector of the community out there, who would rather gather together old books and do unspeakable, God-awful things to them. This involves (but is certainly not limited to) folding them into lanterns; lacquering them into stacks to use as occasional tables and doorstops; and tearing off covers and spines to convert into notebooks and bookmarks (imagine if someone tore off a person’s arm and then shoved it down your jumper to remind you where you were going; it’s that sort of hideous).

Some people only buy books based on what they look like. The books are not to be read; they are not to be opened at all. They are colour co-ordinated to match furnishings in overly-decorated interiors. It makes you wonder why these people install bookshelves at all. I once met someone who stacked their bookshelves with books spine inwards so that the appearance of all the books’ fore-edges could create an “interesting effect”. This would not seem to be such a bad thing – after all, the books are not being destroyed – but they only remain undamaged until the interior decorator decides to alter the appearance of their decor. Then all the books go to the tip. There’s a movement locally amongst Real Estate agents (who eat their own young, incidentally) to encourage their tenants to not bring books to their rental premises at all, much less decorate with them, as they create an “eyesore”. WTF?

Worst of all, are those people who buy books to cut up for the purpose of scrapbooking or découpage. This is where you slice all of the pretty pictures out of perfectly good books and either paste them into another book, or lacquer them onto boxes, or items of furniture, to create objects of kitsch. I have had plenty of discussions with such people – who will make a beeline to your art section with murder on their minds – and I stringently derail all their efforts, by denying them access to anything that will suit their present bloody project. I endeavour not to tell them to drag their miserable carcases out of my shop and never darken my door again, because that way lies an absence of customers from the wider community, but I’ve come close. Pretty damned close actually.

It wouldn’t be so bad if they just bought books and left without telling what sacrilege was fermenting in their feckless little brains; but no, they take great delight in explaining what it is they’re about to do with this rare, limited edition printing of the world’s best examples of Japanese painted screens; or a deluxe Taschen edition of 60’s Pop Art; or an exquisite unblemished copy of Pixie O’Harris’s Sea Greenie and Pearl Pinkie. It’s like they think they’re doing something wonderful and fully expect you to be pleased for them.

I tell you, burning ain’t good enough.

Black Books...

I’ve watched Dylan Moran’s comedy vehicle “Black Books”. By way of proof I offer this piece of evidence:

It is, in my opinion, the most depressing, soul-destroying piece of documentary television I think I’ve ever seen. I think most booksellers would agree with me.

Many times I’ve had customers ask me at work, apropos of nothing, “Have you seen ‘Black Books’?” with a sort of gleeful expectancy. I generally say “Yes”, and try to leave it at that. If I say “No”, then they insist that I seek it out and thrill to the circumstance of seeing my world enacted in farcical terms before me. The problem is, it’s no farce – it’s all too real.

Take Bernard for example. He is a curmudgeonly, misanthropic, growling autocrat, a bundle of bad attitude and worse social skills. He is, in fact, like most booksellers I’ve worked for. For example:

There was the fellow who employed me way back when I had long – very long – hair, and decided that I was a homosexual, despite all evidence to the contrary. His first words to me were “Well I hate your guts, but we’ll see how we go.”

Then there was the bookseller I worked for who took an instant dislike – without any reason – to anyone who spelt their name “Graeme”. He always called them “Greams” and pointedly made their lives Hell. He also once decided to bid on his own stock online to beat up the prices and was seriously put-out when E-bay came to call and reprimanded him sharply.

There was a bookseller I knew who, when I tried to buy a certain book from her for 12 bucks, told me at the point where I was handing over my cash, that it had been “removed from sale”. Then, as I made to leave, feeling quite disgruntled, she stopped me at the exit and told me that I “could have it if I liked”. She’d made a quick check online in the interim to make sure that I wasn’t doing her out of some big sale.

Have I worked for a bookseller with Bernard Black’s substance abuse issues? Well, one of my managers was habitually stoned from dawn ‘til dusk, then drunk from dusk ‘til dawn, so I guess that counts.

These are fairly minor examples, and the ones which won’t get me into too much hot water for talking out of school. Basically, most bookdealers want to lurk in the back of their stores while punters toss money in through the door: they don’t want people to take their stock; they don’t want to engage with them on any level; but they do want the money. For the most part, they hide their prickly natures behind their staff.

If you meet a sales assistant in a bookshop, five’ll-get-you-ten that they’re a student. They will be inanely greeting customers or they will be trying to be unseen at the back of the shop, dusting the same books over and over. They will be oily and ingratiating, or next to invisible; what they won’t be is any use at all.

These types of employees will be watching the clock; they will be waiting to get home and write their paper or play something on their X-box. The only thing that they are unquestionably able to do, is to ramp up the aggression levels of their boss. However, their bosses are usually too non-confrontational to actually give them the boot.

Of course, not all of us are like this. Some of us have met enough of our own to know how to tone it down or to play against type. Now that you know, you’ll be able to spot the really useful booksellers from the duds.

Just don’t ask us what we think of “Black Books”.

Canto IV - The Rising Gorge of Idiocy...

There is an occupation out there somewhere in the world which goes by the name “personal shopper”. It sounds like an interesting job – fulfilling the gift-buying obligations of those too wealthy and too busy to do it themselves - but I’m sure it’s fraught with difficulty. Get it wrong, and it could well be calamitous.

Book sellers are not – by any definition – the de facto personal shoppers of those people who enter their places of business. We don’t know your friends and family; we don’t know who you are; we certainly cannot pronounce judgement on our wares as to their suitability as a gift for your loved ones. Essentially, we are not all-knowing.

After asking us for something to give to your Aunt Beryl, you will no doubt dismiss out of hand the first three suggestions which we offer: you will, it transpires, know your Aunt Beryl better than you think; certainly better than we do. Most likely, you will suddenly decide, after having wasted an unthinkable portion of our existences, that what she would like most is a pot plant, and then you will leave without compensating us for having given you time to reflect upon the nature of your quest and its outcome. Thanks for nothing.

While it may be a bit of an ego-stroke for customers to wander in and assume that we do possess powers akin to those of God, in the long run it only causes irritation.

Canto III - The River Styx...

Books have been around in one form or another for millennia. The structure of the book is perfectly evolved to handle a serious amount of abuse, from dirt, to rough handling, to fire and even moisture. Of course, books are not impervious to these types of damage, but they are resistant. One thing they are not designed to deal with though is stickiness.

In the course of preparing books for sale, I encounter all kinds of stickiness. Prime among these are old price tags from former dealers. These run the gamut from fairly inoffensive removable tags to the kind that absolutely destroy the book as you peel them off. The worst kind are the electronic security tags that some shops use and which they think will save their stock from being stolen, when, in fact, they are countered by the simple expedient of holding a largish coin over them as you pass through the security gate at the exit. You heard it here, folks! Perhaps the irremovable nature of these gadgets is some kind of payback for being so mind-numbingly easy to outwit, who can say?

The other annoying price tags are the ones that are pre-cut so that they separate into many sections rather than peeling off in one go. I’m looking at you, Kinokuniya...

Having removed the sticker there’s often a tacky patch that is left behind which, is irritating to the touch and which will transfer gummy smears to the rest of the book. The best way to deal with this – and indeed most types of tags – is the simple application of eucalyptus oil using a tissue. Lightly soak the tissue, wipe the affected area, sponge up any excess, allow to dry. It works like a charm and, if you have a cold, there’s a bonus side-effect!

The worst thing about price tags is that they can lift the lacquer on a book’s cover, and this is becoming more evident with the modern types of paperbacks that are being produced these days. Lacquer is used to make a book cover extra shiny; or, if the required effect is a matte one, then the lacquer gives the wrapper a textured kind of rubbery effect. The problem is that, with so much lacquer, the sticker adheres to it rather than the cover, and when you peel the sticker off, a patch of lacquer comes with it. It looks bad and, since the lacquer helps make the book somewhat waterproof, your new book is now a sponge waiting to get to work. Eucalyptus oil might work with these situations, but be careful: those matte lacquers can react badly to the treatment and you can end up with a blotchy, tacky mess.

One place I worked at, we used a spray furniture polish to clean books, a product called “Mr Sheen” (nothing to do with Charlie or Martin). It works a treat, but a little goes a long way.

A note of warning: if you use these cleaning methods, use them only on paperbacks, on the dustwrappers of hardcover books, or on dustwrapper-less hardbacks with shiny covers. The boards of most hardback books are composed of non-waterproof substances and they will be effectively destroyed by these treatments.

Something which is occasionally encountered in books is tape. Some people mistakenly think that putting tape along the edges of the dustjacket will protect it from chipping or wearing and this is true – for a microsecond. Sticky tape is a type of adhesive celluloid and rapidly becomes yellowish and brittle if exposed to light, or high temperatures. The glue is highly acidic also and reacts badly with book paper. In short order the tape will flake off and the glue will have created horrible dark brown marks on your books’ pristine surfaces. Some people cunningly plastic-wrap their books and are careful to make sure that any tape they use doesn’t touch any part of the book, attaching only the plastic wrap to itself. It doesn’t matter: the acidic chemicals in the glue emit vapours that assault the paper and voila! Horrible dark brown marks. Repeat after me: tape and books don’t mix,

And forget about Scotch Tape, so-called “Magic Tape”, too. Not so magic. Not so much.

Other types of sticky tend to come in the form of substances that come into contact with the book while you’re enjoying the contents. These run to gamut from jam to red wine, and I’ve seen them all in my book-cleaning time. Just remember: a mildly damp cloth will take care of anything that you smear on the shiny outer covers of your novel or its dustwrapper. That lacquer is built to take it. If you spill something onto the pages, that’s a different story; but be quick and mop with something absorbent and you will probably minimise the devastation.

Speaking of which: if you wet a book with glossy plates on the inside, you run the risk of sticking those pages together. Break out the hairdryer and blow them dry on a light heat: they will probably buckle or ripple slightly, but, if any moisture remains, they will become glue-y and stinky, which is worse. If they stick together, any effort to separate them will tear the surface of each plate and render them useless.

What else? I once found a jam doughnut in a book that had been flattened and put back on the shelf for a week. A quick funeral was all that could be done. Some things – like an erotic text with the pages glued together - are just too obnoxious to attempt rectifying...

In the final analysis, it’s best to treat your book in the same way that you treat your computer: don’t let any sticky, damp, or wet things get close to it. In this way you avoid that sinking feeling that you get when you spot the champagne glugging out of the disc drive on your laptop. Been there, done that...

Canto II - The Dark Valley of the Non-Bookmarkers...

People get interrupted all the time while they’re reading. Many people will place their book opened and face-down nearby while they deal with the distraction; other people – those who can fully expect to enter Heaven - use bookmarks. There is a special place in Hell though, for those people who turn down the corner of their page and shut the book.

A book that has suffered this indignity is referred to as “dog-eared” for the comparison which the disfigurement begs. The resulting crease across the top (or bottom) corner of the page means that the book will never close properly afterwards and will cause the text block to “fan”, meaning that whenever it gets put back on the shelf it runs the risk of being further damaged in the process.

The worst instance of this that I’ve seen was while sitting behind a reader on a bus. When he finished reading both sides of a leaf, he folded the top corner of the left-hand page all the way down into the gutter of the book and pressed it down carefully into a sharp crease. For the next page he folded the bottom corner of the page up in the same fashion. Rinse and repeat. The result was that the book started to resemble some weird paper-craft project like one of those fold-out Christmas stars. It was the worst bus trip of my life.

Of course it’s not as bad as - I forget who did this: I keep thinking it’s Samuel Johnson but he’s too early; possibly G.K. Chesterton? – anyway, whoever it was, they would read a book while travelling up to London by train. As they finished reading the leaf, they tore it out of the book, and tossed it out the window. There’s an especially deep and scalding bit of Hell reserved for this fellow...

In my day-to-day work routine, I’m constantly pulling bookmarks out of books which I’m cataloguing for sale; these get given back to customers wherever they’re presentable enough. Where they’re damaged, written on, or detrimental to the book, we recycle them in other ways. Some bookmarks are not well-designed: any bookmark which is made of metal, for example is a big no-no. Reject them out of hand. Those that have tassels are alright, but please make sure that no part of the string lies between the pages because string is not flat and will deform the book. The best bookmarks are those that come as part of the binding, in the form of ribbons.

Sales receipts, leaves, concert tickets: lots of things end up as bookmarks and not all of them are good for the book. One thing that always freaks me out when I’m cleaning up a book, is finding a piece of toilet tissue in a book, used to mark a page. I can’t tell you how disgusting I find this. Please just don’t.