So we went from summer to winter in about a three day span, from 80 degree beach days to the current windy overcast with an undercurrent of mist. I blame Saturday night's earthquake, which managed to surprise me as they all do. I was in the kitchen tending a pot of soup, wondering why the pestle was rocking back and forth in the mortar.
It's the kind of weather conducive to reading, and so good for selling books, time for me to settle in at the counter with a big mug of coffee and move some stock out the door.
Today's first customer was a meaty fellow with a pronounced underbite who asked, or rather grunted, "Where do you have books on satanism?" I sent him along to our Esoterica section, which is a catch-all for everything from serious metaphysics to UFOlogy to flaky junk like La Vey's Satanic Bible (available in convenient pocket book format!)
He eventually returned with a neat copy of Secrets of the Pyramids and asked hopefully "So is there some other bookstore with more, like, Alister Crowley, Satanism sort of stuff?"
"The only other bookstore in town is Barnes & Nobel," I replied.
"Oh."
To paraphrase Max Von Sydow from Hannah & Her Sisters, if Alister Crowley saw the sort of person who comes in looking for his books he'd never stop throwing up
Another customer brought in a box of books to sell, including one I'd never seen before by Farley Mowat, a common author who I would have sworn on a stack of bibles had no secrets from a grizzled professional bookseller like myself. Which is one of the great things about this business- you can work a counter for decades, sift through millions of books, and there are always surprises.
Farley Mowat's most obscure title?
Sibir: My Discovery of Siberia.
Not valuable, just interesting.
No comments:
Post a Comment