Sellepathy (n.): The ability of a bookseller to figure out what the frak a customer actually wants based on spotty or erroneous information.
I was reminded of this (well, OK, I was reminded of the concept, but I just made up the word, and I’m not seeing it elsewhere on the Web, so you heard it here first) by a customer request today. She came in, eager to find a textbook for her English class, something like The Raft of Grapes. She was pleased when I quickly handed her Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.
Another customer, just before Christmas, came to me looking for “that book about Manhattan by the guy who wrote The Devil Wears Prada.” It took me a moment to realize that she meant One Fifth Avenue by Candace Bushnell, author of Sex and the City.
But the oddest was back in San Francisco. I was on my way to lunch when, heading past the second floor information desk, I heard a customer driving the other workers nuts with a vague request. I couldn’t resist kibbitzing.
They told me that she was looking for a book that we had had on display somewhere on the ground floor, and that it was yellow. Obviously kidding, I said, “It must be Miranda July.”
“Yes!” the customer yelped. And, indeed, it was her Nobody belongs here more than you.
There are, of course, the hopeless cases. Some time back, a customer came in looking for “That book you were advertising a while back. You know, the one that had just come out. It was the one by a woman. Where is it? I’m in a hurry!”
Sellepathy wasn’t enough. But if we ever manage to combine it with blurvoyance, we may figure that one out.
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I had a customer once ask, “It has a red cover and it’s about love.”
I pointed to the store and said, “That’s about half the books here.”
Another time I had a customer asking for Tolstoy’s new book… (thanks, Oprah)
But this holiday season I had a woman ask, “Where’s your fiction? And your non-fiction?” She didn’t know anything about the book. Usually you can ask some questions like, “how’d you hear about it?” but she wouldn’t say.
Eventually she decided to just look for it herself. I don’t know if she found it. Maybe she’s still looking…
And of course in the world of public service reference work in libraries we have analogous experiences. I tend to refer to our triumphant moments as “pulling a rabbit out of the hat.” At our university library we regard this as part of our teaching mission, so when we do produce said rabbits, we tend also to explain how we did it. I look forward to my shifts on the Ref Desk.
I thought The Wrath Of Grapes was a book about surviving hangovers.
And I am blurvoyant today, but only because I broke my glasses.
I am apparently legend in my store for my ability to sellepath. I now have a title to go with my power. I am sellepathic. There should be a secret underground game based on the ability to find a book on the lowest amount of information available. I will say that being involved in the merchandising does help tremendously when it comes to this skill.
A biography of this Indian guy named Sid Arthur…
It’s called “No Falling On Cedars”
That Monk Puppy book
and my absolute favorite:
it’s this book about the winter oympics. The title is “Mice are Gay”
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