The Path of the Bookseller

Had I been on top of absolutely everything, as customers expect their omniscient, omnipotent, and groveling booksellers to be, I would have known well ahead of time that the Newbery and Caldecott medals were to be awarded today. Fortunately, I had read the Shelf Awareness newsletter this morning, and had seen not only that they would be announced, but that the event would be webcast, and that the announcements would be propagated over Twitter.

While I was pleased to see this, it led to a bit of frustration. Despite our customers’ assumptions, we can’t easily get at the Net from our workstations in the store. Through a lot of trial and banging at things, the folks at my previous store and I had discovered that we could get at a few sites, apparently from some mysterious list maintained somewhere deep in the corporate Fortress of Solitude. Thus, from a single workstation at the store, we can get at NPR (though not the audio), the New York Times, MSNBC, CNN, Wikipedia, Oprah’s network of sites, and a few others, which someone chose fairly arbitrarily.

I let my coworkers know at the morning meeting that the awards would be announced, and, at the declared time of 9:45, set to the task of finding out who won. Unfortunately, the expected sources of information were quiet. NPR.org: nothing; the New York Times: nothing; MSNBC: nothing; and so on.

The traffic during the day was a little steadier than yesterday. Several people came in looking for particular kids’ books, particularly some by Neil Gaiman (which I chalked up to the increasing publicity for the upcoming movie of Coraline). We also had some looking for picture books, few of which I could find, despite the computers’ claiming that we had them.

The day was complicated by a sudden change to our methods of taking special orders for books that we didn’t have in stock. By corporate fiat, we were no longer to use the ordering system that we’d been using since I’d started with the company years ago. Instead, we were to use a new system. The complications: the system is only available from a single workstation, far from the main information desk, and from which we can’t see the rest of the store. And, instead of letting customers pay for the books when they picked them up, they now have to pay when they place the order.

That latter issue made me afraid that the whole thing would be a catastrophe, and that people would resist paying for an item without seeing it. I was pleased and surprised, though, that not a one of the five or six people that I helped with orders saw it as any problem at all. I was sure to let them know that things had changed as of this morning, and that we would need to take payment in advance. At the appropriate point in the transactions, they whipped out their credit cards and the whole thing went pretty well. (Paying with cash will be a problem, though: since the computer doesn’t actually handle any physical money, people who want to pay cash will have to purchase gift cards for the amount at the cash registers, then enter the codes from the gift card to pay. But we’re encountered this with another situation, and people are generally quite amiable about it.)

By lunchtime, I still had no word on the awards. Coming back from lunch, though, I realized that the information might have routed effectively around the usual mainstream media sites. I went to the Wikipedia pages for the two medals, and, sure enough, there was word of the winners: for the Newbery, Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book; for the Caldecott, Beth Krommes’ illustrations for The House in the Night, written by Susan Marie Swanson.

And, sure enough, we were out of both: those were the books for which the customers had swarmed earlier, before I got word. My theory, based on our customers’ previous behaviour, is that they had been driving around listening to NPR, who probably announced the information well before they got around to putting it online, and the customers had come to the store and pounced on the books.

We got a few more customers looking for the books later in the day. None wanted to order them when they learned that we had run out. Apparently, the books triggered their inner children to demand “Want book NOW!” Fortunately, none of them were inspired to lie on the ground, flail their limbs around, and cry, since most of the store just doesn’t have the floor space to let grownups do so without hurting themselves.

Most nodded when we told them that award-winning books do tend to sell out almost immediately, but that we usually get them back in fairly quickly. Some, however, put on unconvincing acts of surprise: “What? They won awards? How wonderful! I would have never guessed! I guess I just have really good taste!”

Yeah, right. I was tempted to tell them to stand in the corner until they behaved, but they would have blocked the book-ordering workstation. If the cafe had been distributing samples of cocoa and cookies, I would have tried to use my apparent psychic powers to keep them from getting at them. Not that that would have worked… but there was, at least, some comfort in the fantasy. Harrumph. Oh, well.