The Path of the Bookseller

The four of us stood staring upward, mouths agape, like turkeys in the rain. Once again, it was snowing inside the store.

It was a finer snow this time, drifting steadily downward from a leak in the skylight’s window seal, caused by what had accumulated on top of the glass overnight and through the day. It came down, a few fine flakes each second, each visible for a glistening moment, highlighted by a ceiling lamp before disappearing into shadow. None reached the floor, even in a melted form. It seems that they dissolved into mist that disappeared into the air right after the light hit them, perhaps because of the impact of the light.

I don’t know how long we stood there, clipboards clutched in our hands, badges dangling from around our necks. After the first of us (I don’t know whom) had noticed the indoor snowfall, each of us had wandered over, followed that person’s gaze with our own eyes, and become entranced by what we saw.

Eventually, a quiet “Hello?” brought us out of our reveries. We looked back down and saw a man looking at us, amused rather than annoyed, holding a piece of paper on which some book titles had been scribbled. Oh, right, a customer. It had been a while since we’d seen one of those.

It wasn’t nearly as cold today as it had been, but more snow fell than I had seen on any of my days since coming to town. We heard that the storm was extreme, heavy, and dangerous in other parts of the country, but here it was simply a whole lot of snow.

To my surprise, almost everyone came in to work today. My travels were tricky. I fell over into the snow twice on the way to the bus stop, once on the major street, Cedar Road, itself. Snow had built up previously on lawns, and many sidewalks had been shoveled, causing small walkways between walls of packed snow several inches deep. The new snow, however, was deeper than the accumulation on the sides. There was no way to tell where the high and low footing was. I just had to know as I walked that my next footstep might have to land significantly higher or lower than the last. And I knew that I would probably lose my footing a couple of times and, in fact, I did. Fortunately, a lifetime of clumsiness has made me pretty adept at effectively hitting the ground, and I was dressed for the weather, so falling into snowbanks didn’t make me any colder.

The customers stayed away, though. Most of the local school districts declared a snow day, and many businesses stayed closed, so many people cuddled up at home. The hardy and foolhardy, however, would not be swayed from their shopping, so those few showed up.

Many of the other businesses in the mall closed early. Since we are the largest business in this small mall, at least one other business declared that they would only close if we did. Their workers would occasionally wander into our store to see if we were remaining open. We were.

I understand that there are corporate guidelines that declare how slow things have to be before we close. We never seemed to get below that level. Even in what would normally be our busiest hours, though, business seemed close to dead. At one point in the 6 PM hour, our sole cashier announced that so far that hour she had sold one magazine and three books, but that the person buying the books had returned two others. This led to an extended discussion of whether the returns were to be considered in deciding if we had met the sales quota. The debate went on until our supervisor threatened to do a dramatic reading from a Clique novel over the headsets rather than hear it continue.

In the absence of customers, we got a lot done. We were working on an RPL, where we pull the books that the corporate overlords decide have not been selling well, and send them back to the publishers. (Yes, as people who aren’t in the business may not know, that’s the way things work for publishers: not only do they pay to ship books to the bookstores, but in most cases the bookstores can ship them back on the slightest whim, again at the publisher’s expense. As a publisher, this strikes me as insane, but I can see that it works from a bookseller’s point of view: if we weren’t able to send most stuff back, we would never gamble on anything other than sure-thing best sellers.)

Usually, I am terribly inefficient on these, since I’m continually interrupted. Today, however, I was able to plow through the lists. By the end of the day, I had gone through nine pages of listings and pulled more that four V-cart loads (each about four feel tall) off the shelves just from the References and Languages department.

Eventually, though, I had to go home, leery as I was of facing the weather. But the snow had stopped by then, and it still didn’t seem very cold — though my opinion of that changed after I had waited for the bus for a full hour, the one that I had expected having apparently decided that it just didn’t went to run.

I’m off work on Thursday. I may not go outside at all. I have too many things to do, including finishing the cover design for 19th Nervous Breakdown and continuing processing and formatting on a book that I’m putting together for a friend. Given the draftiness of this house, I may not be all that much warmer than if I were to go outside. But unless the indoor precipitation genie is following me around, I’ll probably stay dry.