The Path of the Bookseller

The customer seemed almost too eager to buy things. She had only been vaguely aware of eReaders before, but when I gave her a very brief demo of ours, she bought it. Offered the company’s Rewards Plus cards, she bought it. I mentioned several books that she might like, and she bought all of them, too.

“Do you know how to connect and set-up the eReader?” I asked.

“Well,” she said, “my husband is — my husband was good at it. He can — well, he could have helped me. We’ll — I’ll figure it out.”

She rummaged around in her purse. “Now where did I put that new checkbook?” She pulled random items out and scattered them on the counter. I could see that her hands (thin, pale, wrinkled, with dark veins tracing a path between the age spots) were subtly shaking.

She pulled the checkbook out, and I handed her a pen. Before I hit the “Total” key, I remembered to ask her one more question. “Will you need gift receipts?”

“Oh, no,” she replied. “This is all for me.”

She paused, closed then opened her eyes, and looked up at me. “It’s not like me to spend money like this. Always, I’ve gotten things for everyone else: family, friends, charities, the church. I’m always — I’ve always been frugal, always lived within my means. But this, this is…”

She paused again and gestured at the items that she was buying, then at her checkbook. “I’ve just put fifty thousand dollars in this bank account. This was my husband’s… my husband… passed away not long ago. This is his insurance. I know that I have to be careful with this. I intend to live a long, long time — well, I’ve already lived a long time, but I intend to live even longer, and this money will have to last. But for now, this… this is for me. Just this once, this is for me. Now how much is this?”

I told her the total, which was somewhere between two and three hundred dollars.

“And, um, which store is this again?”

I reminded her. She filled out the check and handed it to me with an ID. I ran the check through the register. It worked immediately. I popped it into the register and tore the long receipt from the printer. “Would you like one or more bags? I mean, since we no longer have the complimentary forklifts.”

She laughed. “Yes, thank you. Bags will be fine.”

I loaded the items into three of our large shopping bags. “Do you need help getting these out to your car?”

“No, I can handle them myself. But thanks.”

She took the bags, putting one on each wrist and one in one hand, grasping her cane with the other.

“Have fun,” I said.

“Yes, I will,” she said. “Yes. I intend to have fun.”

The one question I get asked more often than any other (yes, more often than “Where are the restrooms?” and “Why is there a giraffe on top of that bookcase?”) is “When are you closing?”

For a long time, my default answer has been “At 10 PM, but we’ll open again tomorrow morning at 10.”

Now, however, the media are (is?) full of frightening stories suggesting that our chain is about to disappear. We’re not, at least not immediately. We’re reasonably sure that we’ll be around for a while. As Mark Twain was reported to have said (falsely, it appears), the reports of our death have been greatly exaggerated.

Still, it’s been quite wearing. We’re hovering in a state of not knowing what’s going on. We understand that there may not be much that our corporate overlords can tell us officially, but it means that we get our information through the media, the same as our customers do. I keep an ear open for what I can, running searches on our stock, tweets about the company, and news reports on my phone. We’ve developed a pretty good sense of discernment about what parts of what we hear are true, but there’s still some deep uncertainty. It’s akin, emotionally, to the feeling we get when someone we care about has been admitted to the hospital but we don’t have a diagnosis or prognosis yet. We leave work exhausted each day, not so much from the work as from the wondering.

Customers approach us with supposed information in a variety of ways. The best express real concern, hoping that we’ll survive, understanding the cost to the workers and the community if we don’t.

Others, however, approach us with smirking, winking glee, with the expectation that, since we work for a Big Faceless Corporation, whatever we say will be a lie designed to suck money from them. They view any human interaction as a win/lose situation in which they must either turn a profit or lose some sort of karma, no doubt tied into physical power and perhaps gender identity. Apparently, truth is irrelevant here in Ferengistan.

We get some people who look at us plaintively and ask us what’s happening with the store. We tell these what we know, as plainly as possible, trying to provide some encouragement that things will continue.

Fortunately, many customers neither know or care that there are any reported problems. I am relieved by any transaction where they just want to, you know, buy things, rather than get the news.

And I just realized that this has turned into a riff on the Four Sons from the Passover Haggaddah, (I can never decide how many “g”s and “d”s to put in that word between the two “h”s and three “a”s.) Which probably means that it’s time for me to go to bed and try not to dream about all this.

The customer placed seven mysteries on the counter. Two were large print editions. The rest were mass market paperbacks, three in the newer taller model (is there a term for those?) and four in the standard size. “Gotta have my mysteries,” he said. “I love when I get the large print, but I’ll read them any way I can get them.”

“Have you tried eBooks?” I asked. “They can turn any book into large print.”

“Yeah, my nephew keeps trying to talk me into them. But I want a real book. I like the way they feel when you open a new one, the way they smell.”

A lot of people rhapsodize about the way books smell — but only when contrasting them with eBooks. I don’t think I ever heard anybody ever mention the smell of books before they were threatened by odorless technology.

“You know,” I said, “I’ve known quite a few people who said that they absolutely would never read an eBook. Then someone gave them an eReader, and they fell in love with it.”

“Yeah, I know. I don’t know, maybe my nephew will give me one and I’ll change my mind. How many books do those things hold, anyway?”

“They say that the ones we carry can hold a thousand books apiece. Book files are really small, compared to music and movies. That’s good for people who read mysteries and romance and the other genre books. I bet you’ll only read any of these once.”

“Yeah, and they do pile up. I try to trade them with my friends, but too many of my friends aren’t living anymore.”

I nodded.

“You know, my nephew, he keeps saying I got to get email, I got to get an iPod, him with all his machines and things, machines to read books, machines to do music, machines that all they do is run other machines… He keeps talking about the way things were back in the day. I tell him he wasn’t even around in the day. What he thinks was the day was a day or two after the day.”

I nodded again.

“And I’ll tell you, they just don’t believe the way thinks really were in the day. I used to live out East 79th Street. Now, you’d be nuts just to go out on the street there without a bullet-proof vest or something. In my day? We kept the windows open when it wasn’t winter, no bars on them or nothing. And people today freak if a kid gets out of their sight for a minute. I would walk anywhere without being bothered by nobody. Everybody knew who everybody was, everywhere you’d walk. Now? No one knows nobody. There’s too many people, and none of the people gives a damn about other people other than himself. ”

He stopped and looked to his right. Three people had lined up to check out while he was talking.

“Speaking of other people, I better get moving and not hold them up. You take checks?”

“Sure,” I said, “as long as it has your phone number with area code on it.”

He held up his checkbook so that I could see the check, not yet filled out. “Looks good to me,” I said.

“Good. Now, um, what store is this again?”

He paid, then headed off with his bag of books.

The woman who was next in line place her five romances on the counter. “I heard what the last customer was saying. Yes, when I was young, everyone would sit on the porches when it was warm. We never locked our back door. I don’t think any of us actually had the key for it anymore. But now…” She paused and sighed. “And yes, I should get an eReader. But I so love the smell of books…”

“Our plan is to drop a lot of odd objects onto your country from the air. And some of these objects will be useful. And some of them will just be odd. Proving that these oddities were produced by a people free enough to think of making them in the first place. The U.S. helps, not harms, developing nations by using their natural resources and raw materials.” — Laurie Anderson

Although we’re still primarily a bookstore, we now carry a lot of things that aren’t books. Some of them, while immensely popular, are quite odd.

Take, for example, one of the biggest items of the past couple of years:  Smencils. These are, as you may or may not realize from the name, pencils with interesting smells.

You have to wonder how these came to be created. (The official website gives no clue.) Did somebody writing something one day come up with a sudden urge to make his or her pencil smell nice? Did somebody smell a favorite scent and wonder why pencils didn’t smell like that?

Then there are stuffed animals designed to wipe computer screens clean. Did someone, cuddling a stuffed duck, wonder if it could clean a computer screen? Or did someone wiping a screen realize that this was really a job for a stuffed duck?

And then, of course, there are last year’s rage, Silly Bandz. These are rubber bands in odd shapes. People wear them on their wrists, which distorts the shape unrecognizably, which would seem to miss the point of their existence. But they sold like mad.

The common factor seems to be that they appeal to elementary school girls, and have the lifespan of dragonflies.

I imagine that there must be a massive facility somewhere that thinks up these things, perhaps generating millions of combinations of possible features to find one that clicks. Somewhere out there, you’ll find baby elephants that dispense lip balm, shampoo that smells like kittens, and nail clippers that sound like Justin Bieber. They’re either stashed in a massive bewildering landfill or languishing in the Dollar Store from hell.

Some day, long after we’re gone, the aliens will finally land on Earth and find these things. At which point they will either worship us and forever cherish our memories, or just emit a cosmic “Huh?”, blast the planet clean, and move on.

I just realized that, while I had posted about this to my site’s main page and to thebookofvoices.com, I hadn’t blogged it. So here it goes (in somewhat more detail than the brief notices at the other places).

The Book of Voices will be published this coming November by Apocryphile Press. I was very pleased with the press’s publication of Shekhinah: the Presence and The Rounds, and approached Apocryphile again when The Book of Voices was complete.

This means that I have a lot of work to do between now and then. I’m working toward a multifaceted release, with a lot of use of web media. This includes

• a complete revamping of thebookofvoices.com (possibly using the Drupal software) with “commentary track” pages and conversation threads for each story
• an audiobook podcast of many of the stories in the book
• an afterword to be included in the book, as well as a possible book group readers’ guide
• collaborating on the cover design and book trailer video.

It’s a daunting process, especially since I’m pretty much working in a vacuum here in Ohio, with most of my collaborators and advisers hundreds or thousands of miles away. The trickiest aspect right now seems to be figuring out in which order to do things.

What I want most, even more than whatever tiny financial gain there might be from the project, is for people to read the book. Only a handful of people have read the whole thing so far, in various stages of completion. I’ve made a PDF file of the most recent draft available (email me if you want to see it), but at this point (until effective eReaders hit, probably within the next year), few people want to read a 400 page book on a screen.

I would love to see the book go viral in the best, classic sense: I dream of people, having read it, recommending it to other people, in their circles of friends, book groups, congregations, and similar karasses and even granfalloons. The current traditional book industry being what it is (looking on its better days like a festering sinkhole), odds of getting it into major stores are slim at best. So it’s going to need a sort of underground indie approach. (But doesn’t everything nowadays…)

I want to communicate that this book is more than just a bunch of stories (though most of the stories can be read on their own that way). On the one hand, it’s a hopefully-coherent collection, with plot threads running throughout the book. I’m influenced in this by the great science fiction future histories, such as Asimov’s Robot and Foundation saga, Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, and Heinlein’s The Past Through Tomorrow, as well as by collections such as the Spoon River Anthology.

On the other, there are emotional and moral issues that keep recurring through the book (some of which even surprised me when I read it end to end for the first time). Characters continually wrestle with questions of compassion, forgiveness, and understanding, as well as the role of music and listening in our lives, and the difficult relationship between God (as imagined in the book) and humankind.

Since most of the people who read the pieces as they were initially written were quite familiar with the Biblical texts and stories on which they were based, I’ve focused in later drafts on making the book more accessible to those who didn’t know the texts. (And I was surprised at how many people don’t know the stories that I had been taking for granted as at the core of our culture.) Curiously, opinions among the few early readers on how certain aspects of the book work seem to follow closely the divide between those who do and don’t already know the stories, even in areas where I didn’t think they would be a factor. I’ll be eager to see how that conversation continues.

So… I’m eager for any comments, suggestions, advice, connections, and the like that folks might offer. I’m more excited about this project than I have been about anything I’ve done in the past couple of decades (!), so let’s see what we can get to happen!