The Path of the Bookseller

The customers came barrelling up to me with the dull glare that suggested that they expected me to cause a problem. “Where your biographies at?” one asked.

People expect a simple answer to this. There isn’t one. Our corporate powers made the unusual but defensible decision, back in ancient days (well, before I joined) not to have a biographies section per se. Instead, biographies of musicians are in the music section, historical figures in the appropriate parts of history, sports figures in sports, etc. We do have two displays of current biographies, one for hardcovers and one for paperbacks, but those are just there to make life more challenging.

“Are you looking for anyone in particular?” I asked.

The other one rolled her eyes. “Contemporary,” she said.

“OK,” I said. “Are you looking for anything in particular?”

“African-American people,” the first one said. “Books about African-American people.”

“We do have an African-American studies section,” I said. “Let’s head over there.”

“No, I ain’t looking in ’studies’,” one said. (I was a few steps ahead of them, so I didn’t know which.) “This is like the Video Vixen girl thing.”

I stopped and reversed course. “That’s back where we came from. Media, Star Bios. Karen Steffans.” Yes, through dint of repeated requests over the years, we all know where to find Confessions of a Video Vixen.

I pulled the book from the shelf and handed it to one of the customers. She didn’t take it, but instead modulated her glare to the “You’re an idiot” frequency. “I didn’t say the Video Vixen. I said like the Video Vixen.”

Oh. “So… do you know who you’re looking for?”

“Yeah, I know the book.”

“Do you know the person’s name?”

“No.”

“Do you know the author?”

“No.”

“Do you know the book’s title?”

“No.”

“Can you tell me anything else about the book?”

“She had a baby and a rapper’s the daddy.”

“OK, do you know the rapper’s name?”

“Nas.”

That was information I could use. “I may be able to figure it out. I’ll be right back.”

While we don’t have much Web access, I have, as I’d mentioned, rigged one workstation so we can easily get at Wikipedia. I looked up the article on Nas, and went down to the section on his personal life.  The information was there: “Nas dated ex-fiancée Carmen Bryan; in 1994, Bryan gave birth to their daughter, Destiny.” I looked up Carmen Bryan in our database. We actually had her book.

I headed back. The customers were standing with their backs to the books, waiting. “OK,” I said. “The name is Carmen Bryan. The book is It’s No Secret, and it’s over here.”

They turned and saw where I was reaching. When I almost had it, one knocked my hand out of the way and grabbed the book. “Yeah, I see it,” she said even more disdainfully than before. “I appreciate it.” The two turned away from me and started to thumb through the book. They didn’t get it, though; after a few moments, they stuffed it randomly onto a shelf of audiobooks and stomped away, pausing for several minutes at the shelves of sex books before wandering off. I sighed and went back to shelving CDs.