blue feathers...

Who says books don’t have an impact on your life?

About thirty years ago, I read the follow up to Richard Bach’s book Jonathan Livingston Seagull called The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah. It was the first time I really heard the concept that you create your own life and that the creation of that life begins in your mind.

In this book, the Messiah, a mechanic who can do miracles and assures everyone he meets that they can as well, teaches Richard Bach how to magnetise things into his life. He tells him to start small, visualise something simple – that if he would hold it in his mind and expect it to come into his life, it would appear. Somehow, somewhere, what you see, strongly, clearly and with expectation, will come to you. You can’t be sure in what form or how it will appear but it will.

Richard Bach visualised a blue feather just to practice and a day or so later, he bought a carton of milk and on the label was a picture of a blue feather.
Ever since I read that, blue feathers have been a buzz for me. Whenever I see a blue feather, I am reminded that I’m in charge of my own life and that there are more things in heaven and earth than I can comprehend with my tiny mind.

About two months ago, a little kid came into my shop carrying a big beautiful blue feather. I went nuts for this feather, telling the kid and his mother how I collect feathers and particularly blue ones. The mother told me that HER mother owned a Macaw and they had heaps of blue feathers at their house. I told them I was jealous. I took it as a good omen for the day and forgot about it.

Last week, they came in again. To tell the truth, I doubt I would have remembered them except that the little boy had a pressie for me; two big beautiful blue Macaw feathers! I gave him a pressie back – a giant bug and some play dough. He seemed as pleased with that as I was with my blue feathers.



How cool is that! Things like this are reason I remain hopeful that we, as in humankind in general, won’t kill ourselves off completely. I know there’s too much thoughtless shitiness in the world but there’s also so much thoughtful niceness.

God, I hate to sound like a Hallmark card but it really is the little things in life that make life worth living.









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...on elephants

The other day, a writer friend of mine came into the Incidental Bookshop. I took her photo and told her that I keep a blog and that she was about to star in it. I haven’t got around to writing her up yet but I think of her all the time now because when I mentioned the blog to her, she said, “A blog about the bookshop? What on earth do you find to write about?”

Man, I wish I had TIME to write about everything that happens in this shop.
They’re small things generally, of course - moments, snippets of conversations, a young man looking for Ginger Meggs comics to read to his blind Grandad, an old man delighted to find Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn on the classics tables to read to his grandson.

Today, a couple came up to the counter holding a book they’d found on one of the tables. The lady said to me, “I just wanted to tell you a bit of history about this book.”

Well, you know me – I love that kind of thing. I had a look at the book’s cover. It was the elephant book that no-one buys: Queenie – One Elephant’s Story. It’s in one of those difficult to sell categories – true stories for the picture book generation.

Queenie was apparently famous the length and breadth of Australia in the first half of the 20th century as a people mover at Melbourne Zoo. She was elephant-napped in India as a baby and brought to Australia where she spent the rest of her life walking around Melbourne Zoo with a bunch of tourists on her back. In the early ‘40s she crushed her keeper, something most people believed was an accident, and was euthanized. Humans are so fickle!

It turns out that the husband half of the couple who brought the book to my attention is the great grandson of Queenie’s very first keeper, Mr Parsons, back in 1902 or so. The great grandson’s name is Albert Strong – a good name to be associated with a story about elephants, don’t you think?

district 9

I love a good sci fi movie. Oh, jeez, okay, I admit it - I've been known to love even a bad sci fi movie.

And so it was that I have been looking forward, with saliva dribbling from my mouth, to the arrival of District 9 at my neighbourhood cinema.

I went along to see it tonight and what can I say? It's as good as the word of mouth told me it would be. And all the better for the fact that for the first twenty minutes, I could barely stand it. I detested the main character - he was a nasty wanker - in other words, the quintessential bureaucrat and I couldn't understand his South African accent. The aliens made me sick to my stomach with their crazy diet. The hand held camera and documentary style made it difficult to follow the action and I felt like I was on one of those scary rides at the show.

But something really strange and magical happened - the film sneakily revealed everybody's humanity ... or do I mean, alien-ness? ... and I suddenly found myself heavily engrossed in the story and invested in the outcome.

Man, it was gory! There were tank chases and helicopter crashes! There was stuff blowin' up all over the shop! There was every kind of weapon known to man and plenty I've never seen before as well. There was an alien ship shot down to skid through a Johannesburg slum! There were heads blown off and arms chopped up.

I tell you this to set up something happened on the way out of the theatre that had me and The Princess Bookaholic laughing our guts out all the way home. As we left the cinema, we were talking about how much we liked the film and how we both felt the same way - that we could have left in the first twenty minutes and would have been glad to escape. We walked past a group of young guys and heard one of them say, "Meh, it was o-kay.... I expected there to be a bit more action."

A BIT MORE ACTION??????

I looked at the guy with what I suspect was utter incredulity and then at The Princess Bookaholic. She was looking at me in just the same way. We burst out laughing and laughed all the way back to the car, making wild arm motions and coming up with crazy hypothetical action sequences as we tried to imagine what else they could have blown up and how many more creatures, human and otherwise, they could have 'sploded.

I looked back at the guy and could tell he knew we were laughing at him. I felt bad but he smiled at me sheepishly. I'm pretty sure he realised it was a silly thing to say.

Anyway, District 9 is indeed a remarkable movie, all the more because I so hated the beginning of it. I can't believe it brought me back from there.

In conclusion, I have only one more thing to add...

SE-QUEL! SE-QUEL! SE-QUEL! SE-QUEL! SE-QUEL!

Stayed tuned for the next exciting episode of The Incidental Bookshop... Subscribe now!

everything is over-rated...

Today a guy came in looking for a calligraphy set for his daughter. He was a funny man and we kind of chatted a little as I tried to find the set for him amongst the piles of new stock that came in yesterday. "It should be in the craft section," I said.

He said, "Oh, I've already got craft."

I raised an eyebrow at him, not really understanding what he was saying.

"Craft. Can't Remember A Fucking Thing."

Haha.

I found his calligraphy set and as he paid, he said, "Calligraphy. You know, good handwriting is over-rated." I wasn't going to argue about it even though I happen to be heavily in favour of beautiful penmanship.

A philosophical look came over his face. "Well, just about everything is over-rated really. DEATH is over rated."

I raised my eyebrows again as though to say, "Oh, really?"

"Yep. I've been dead. It's not as scary as everyone makes out.'

"Hmmm..." I said, "Did you see the white light?"

"It was more of a blue really," he said. He picked up his calligraphy set and left.

For the rest of the day, I've been thinking, "Man, I REALLY want to know the rest of that story!"

... false arrest

So anyway, Sir Punk's name is Jeremy and he's from Woollongong. He told me that he settled on buying Les Miserables because he played Gavroche in a stage production when he was a kid. We had a great little chat and before he left, I gave him the address of the blog so he could check himself out.

What I didn't give him amongst all the chit chat was his receipt of purchase.

Five minutes later, Janelle from The Other Bookshop came in and picked up one of the classics. She brought it over to me and said, "You didn't just sell a bikie looking guy one of these books, did you?"

Oops! They sell the same edition there and when he went into their shop straight after mine, she saw him walk out with the one I'd just sold him and called security to look out for him. Oh dear. She hotfooted it back to The Other Bookshop and called security again to say something along the lines of "Abort! Abort! Mission to apprehend the only punk in North Queensland has been aborted!"

I thought it was kind of funny until bout five minutes later when up rocks Mark the Security Guard holding a familiar copy of Les Mis. Obviously, Janelle's message didn't reach them soon enough.

Jeez, YES! I did sell the bikie looking punk a copy of Les Mis. If it's so unbelievable that he would buy the damn thing, why the hell would he nick it?

I said just that to Mark but in a nicer way and he said they were holding Punk Jeremy from Woollongong at the Police Beat office. I felt real bad about it; it was because I got chatting about the blog and Les Mis and all of that that I didn't get him a receipt and he walked out without a bag.

I'm known as a bit of a soft touch in the centre - I am always saying things like, "I'm not that worried about locking up the shop - who's going to go to the trouble of breaking in to steal books that they couldn't even sell at full price in the first place?"

"Mate!" says Paul, the hardened Security Guy. "Mate, they'd steal anything! They'd steal the sole off your shoe if you walk too slow around here."

I don't think Mark really quite believed me that the guy had bought the book. I think he thought I was having a compassion attack and was lying to protect him. I said, "Mate, I took a picture of the man holding up his book!"

Mark said, "You what?"

I struggled valiantly to make my phone cough up the photo in question - usually I would wait to get The Princess Bookaholic to work my recalcitrant tech gadgets for me but she wasn't around and there was a Punk In Distress being unjustly detained.

I got the photo on screen finally and Mark cracked a smile as he looked at it. "Well, that's proof I guess," he said shaking his head at the oddness of me having a photo of the punk.

When we got to Police Beat, Paul my other favourite Security Guy was waiting outside the door with a look like thunder on his face. Apparently Jeremy had been somewhat aggravated at being dragged into the cop shop and he and Paul had got their masculinities a trifle ruffled; they were in the midst of a little to and fro-ing involving terms such as 'dick-head' and 'fuckwit'.

Paul was NOT happy to be told he had to let Jeremy go. He looked at me and said, "He bought it???'

Yes. For the hundredth time. The Punk bought a book!

"Bullshit!" said Paul and grabbed the camera off me to have a look. "Ok. Give me the book."

I pulled it out of his reach. "Uh-uh."

"I'll give it back to him," he said in the same tone as he might have used to say 'I'll shove it up his arse.'

"I'll give it back to him, no worries - but first I'm going to keep him here for an hour so he misses his bus." He grabbed the book off me.

"You can't do that."

"Why not? He's being a cockhead!"

"Paul! Because he didn't DO anything!" I grabbed the book back again and headed into Police Beat. There sat Jeremy in the waiting room, leaning forward, elbows on thighs, looking at the floor. He looked up at me like I was his long lost mother. I bent over and patted his cheek and said, "Oh, I'm sorry about that! It's my fault I didn't give you the receipt."

As we left, Paul and Jeremy exchanged final little verbal zingers. Dickhead. Prick. That kind of thing. Mark smiled and shook his head.

Outside, Jeremy said, "I was saying to them, 'The lady even took my photo!' They didn't believe me!"

"Well, I can't say I blame them - I don't believe I took it either."

What are the odds that the first time I talk myself into asking a stranger for his photo for the blog that I would need it within half an hour? What are the odds that the first time I have any business whatsoever with security regarding shoplifting that I would have photographic proof to back up a story that Paul was disinclined to believe?

Just before he went off with his book, now in a plastic shopping bag, he said, "I hate it that just because I look like I do, they think I can't read."

He's not worried that they might think he's a thug. Or that he might scare little old ladies with his blue and leopard print mohawk and his safety pinned ears. He just doesn't like it that someone would have the audacity to think he's illiterate! God, love 'im!

a punk in the 21st century...

I was sitting in the Incidental Bookshop this morning, tapping away on my laptop and thinking about how I should be be doing more with The Obsessions of an Incidental Bookseller, when into the shop walked a goddamnned punk. Yeah for real. Not the Clint Eastwood Do-you-feel-lucky-today-well-do-ya-punk type punk. The Sid Vicious type punk. The Vivian-off-the-young-ones type punk. I thought to myself, "See? That's the kind of thing I need to put in the blog." I thought to myself, "In fact, I ought to ask this guy if I can take his picture for the blog."

But I didn't expect I really would. I always think, when someone interesting comes in, that I should have taken their picture for the blog - but I never actually do it.

So then, the punk came right up to me and asked where the novel table was. I told him and asked if he was looking for anything in particular. Yeah. He was. Charles Dickens. Ha! There's fuel for your stereotype exploding machine, I thought to myself. I REALLY ought to take this guy's photo.

I tried to take a long shot of him without his permission because, you see, it's just not that easy asking strangers if you can take their photo. It has the potential to sound really very creepy. But I just couldn't get a decent shot of him with my camera phone as he rummaged around the classics table.

I watched him walk towards the counter with his book, still debating with myself - will I/won't I will I/won't I ask The Punk for permission to take his photo. It's hard. You're basically saying to someone, "My, don't you look UNUSUAL!" But what the hell! He DID look unusual!

He slapped down Victor Hugo's Les Miserables on the counter and I said to him, "My, don't you look UNUSUAL!" No, I didn't. I said, "Hey, I keep a blog about the interesting people who come into my shop and you're one of them. Can I take a photo of you for it?" He gave me a nice smile and said, "Yeah, sure."

"Hold your up book then," I said and snapped.

I can't believe I actually decided to ask. I can't believe I actually took that photo. I can't believe even more that within half an hour both he and I would be extremely glad I did!

Stay tuned for the next exciting episode of a punk in the 21st century...

some timely advice for book designers...

Note to book designers:

No matter how pretty it looks, and you will get no argument from me that it is undeniably pretty, no matter how tempting, how clean, how GOOD it looks,

DO NOT MAKE YOUR BOOK COVER WHITE.

Most especially do not make it WHITE MATTE. Like anything white - white carpet, white dresses, white sand - they don't don't stay white for very long once exposed to the world of man.

Oh, and one more thing - don't put your titles at the bottom of the front cover. If I want to stand a single book up against one taller stack and behind another smaller stack of books, your title is lost. Your book could be about anything and none of us will ever know. All your hard work gone for nothing.

Don't say I didn't warn you!

the trolly wars part II...

You don't really get life until you understand the importance of shopping trolleys in a big shopping centre. They weave the very fabric of whatever civilisation exists in those woeful hellholes that some call malls, criss-crossing the various corridors, rolling helpfully here and there, and just generally making life easier for everyone.

Think about it. Just as the earliest humans leaped up the evolutionary ladder the day they realised that you can carry a LOT more food on a little cart than you can on a piece of bark balanced on top of your noggin, so we progressed several rungs further when we began to gather our food in shopping trolleys. Mothers use them as mobile cages for unruly offspring. Shop keepers take their rubbish out to the garbage compactor in them. Everybody loves shopping trolleys!

The other day, I had a one of those Where-the-heckfire-is-my-camera moments. A window dresser from one of the clothes shops had taken delivery at the loading dock of a bunch of naked half mannequins. Yes. You heard me. Not half naked mannequins. Naked half mannequins. The bottom half. She passed The Incidental Bookshop with a purposeful though slightly self conscious air about her. 'I know I look strange,' her body language said, 'but if you so much as mention it, I'll push a life size plastic foot down your throat.'

And how was she transporting these naked half mannequins? In a shopping trolley of course. She'd shoved them in waist first and it looked like a garden of alabaster feet had sprouted out of it. It was a surreal sight. Especially when she passed behind the waist high wall of the coffee shop near my place. It hid the trolley and made it appear as though she was simply striding along herding a gaggle of floating legs before her.

Yes, trolleys are indispensable - and like every other precious resource in the world, the trolley power is concentrated in the hands of a few at the top of the food chain. Or should I say the food chain stores. Woolworths and Big W own all the trolleys at our centre. They are, generally speaking, beneficent trolley rulers and most of the managers have no great objection to serfs such as The Incidental Bookshop staff borrowing a trolley or two now and then.

But there is 'most of the managers' and then there is...

Clayton!

Clayton, a small man, manager of fruit and veg, was temporarily promoted last Christmas when his superior had a mysterious accident. Yes. We suspect foul play. Anyhow, there was an unfortunate confluence of events around the time of Clayton's rise to power.

1) In the three weeks leading up to Christmas coming, The Incidental Bookshop suddenly began to receive four or five pallets of stock every week instead of
two every fortnight.

2) Shoppers began to shop in ever greater numbers. (as they will over Christmas. It apprently has something to do with good cheer but really, you ought to try spending about forty hours a week in a shopping centre at Christmas time and you will soon learn to say words 'Bah humbug' with feeling). And when shoppers begin to shop in ever greater numbers, ever greater numbers of trolleys are required.

3) A furore broke out in the local paper accusing trolley boys of loafing around smoking cigarettes and selling drugs instead of doing their jobs. This, it was claimed, was the reason there were never any trolleys in the Woolworths shopping trolley bay.

Can you see where this is headed? I bet you can. It has a sense of heavy inevitability about it, doesn't it? The trolley boys weren't loafing any more than usual! The missing trolleys weren't lying fallow out in the car parks!They were in the back of my shop filled with books!

As I said in Part 1 of The Trolley Wars, I had pioneered the trolley packing method of restocking The Incidental Bookshop and everyone agreed that it was a breakthrough in human endeavour pretty much on par with the discovery of fire or brylcreem. We watched sadly, guiltily, as the trolley boys bore the blame for the dearth of trolleys. We knew we were being selfish. We knew we should come clean. We knew that if we were any kind of decent human beings we would go back to carrying those books by hand and stop letting the down trodden boys take the heat for us.

But we couldn't give them up, damn it. Once you've unpacked books using shopping trolleys, you can never go back.

On stock morning, we would arrive at about 7 am and set out across the various empty car parks, ranging far and wide over the tar and cement, gathering the trolleys that hadn't made it back inside the centre the night before. Sometimes we had to bring them in one or two at a time. Sometimes we would hit a gusher and stumble upon a corral that hadn't yet been emptied. When that happened, we could fill our trolley needs in a single trip. Either way, between the the lot of us, we would bring thirty or so trolleys into The Incidental Bookshop as surreptitiously as possible and whiz them as quick as we could out through the back door into the spooky abandoned IGA supermarket where they would wait patiently to fulfill their destinies as book movers.

We even had little arguments among ourselves about it. Sir Laurence the Indispensable liked to use only Woolworths trolleys - they were bigger and brand new and so, much easier to push. I wanted to use only Big W trolleys - Big W was on the other side of the centre and their managers never got over to our part of the building; we were never going to get caught with the Big W trolleys.

I won that argument and to tell the truth, I think Sir Laurence still secretly resents it...

to be continued...

for terminator fans only...

I saw Terminator Salvation tonight and lo! It was good. I just took a quick spin by Rotten Tomatoes to see what The Critics are saying and sadly most of them aren't saying anything too much good.

For example:

The ingenious plotting of the first two Terminator films, and the skill and visceral energy with which James Cameron directed them, are a thing of the past.

David Stratton of At The Movies

And then there's:

It’s a catastrophically bad movie whose aggressive dullness and dumbness can best be reproduced by picking up a brick and slamming it against one’s forehead for two hours.

Sukdev Sandhu of the Daily Telegraph (the British one, I expect, with those manners)

and just for third time lucky kind of thingo, I give you:

This latest Terminator may well please the committed obsessive, but the rest of us are left feeling simultaneously beaten about the head and yet slightly underwhelmed.

Boyd Hilton Heat Magazine.

Well, phooey on them, I say. I must be one of those committed obsessives because I'm just lovin' it.

Mind you, I'm not saying it was a perfect film. Of course it wasn't, but name me one that is. The kid was ridiculously cute and completely unnecessary as a character. Kyle Reese left me utterly unconvinced that he would ever have the testicles to impregnate Sarah Connor when the time came. And the Schwarzenator insertion - well, that was just sad.

But who cares? Who cares? Was the plotting as obvious as some critics claim? I don't know - there were a few things I saw coming and a few I didn't. About par for the course for me. Was there zero character growth and no heart to the characters as some of the others say? Well, I'm not sure what they want out of a film that looks like Mad Max on a particularly apocalyptic day. We don't need continual characterisation here - we all know who John Connor is and what makes him tick. We all know what's in the heart of the Good Terminator whether it's played by Sam Worthington or Our Arnie.

Do I think it's as good as Number 2? No, of course not. But I didn't expect it to be. In fact, I made sure to keep my expectations very low going in. In fact, I almost didn't want to see it at all in case it was so bad it spoiled the series.

Remember The Matrix Revolutions? I was absolutely hooked on The Matrix and I waited for the next installment like a girl waiting for her first date to pick her up. When it turned out to be so very very bad, I felt personally betrayed, as if some one had promised me something I wanted very much and then switched it for a lump of coal at the very last moment. I certainly regretted going to see it. It almost took away the pleasure I felt over the original film. I've never seen the third installment. Maybe it's not so bad - but I just don't have the heart to try.

So yeah - I went along to the cinema tonight with nothing more complex on my mind than to see some robots get blown to smithereens and man, I got what I paid for!

I've loved all of these films. As the show was starting, I remember thinking 'What an epic saga this is!' Would I have liked it as much if I'd never seen the other films? What does it matter? Me and about a million or so other complete obsessives will never have to have that experience.

And, oh yeah - I was pleased to see a move away from the cute sassiness of the Terminator as Gay Stripper Leather boy back towards the the darkness of the first.

Christian Bale rocks and Sam Worthington is too sexy for his cyberdene chip. There is an actress named Moon Bloodgood in it and I want to know what drugs her parents were taking.

Overall, my rating is - hurry up and make the next one because ... I'll be back.

update ...

My next blog was, of course, supposed to be part 2 of 'the trolley wars...' but what can you do? Life happens and you must either record it or let it go by without so much as a 'how's yer father?'. Nope. Not for me, the unexamined life. I blog therefore I am.

Anyhow...

Yesterday, The Princess Bookaholic did the afternoon shift. It was actually her turn to do the coveted morning shift - we both like the morning shift best; it means you get an early mark in the afternoon - but she gave it up to me at the last minute. She was wandering around the house with her hair like a madwoman's and whining about how tired she was, so what was I to do? What would any good mother do?

I said, "I'll go in for you if you like."

She hesitated a moment, yawned and whined a little more and then said, "Yeah, okay."

I then did a little dance and said, "Yippee! I'll be out of there by 2 o'clock."

And why was she so tired by the way? Because she was up all night reading the Count of Monte Christo off the classics table is why.

But that's not why I'm writing this.

Later, after all was said and done at The Incidental Bookshop for the day, when the last book was sold, the till closed down and the millions tallied, The Princess bookaholic said to me, "Oh yeah. A little blonde lady came in looking for you. She said you helped her and she wanted to thank you."

Oh, really? "How'd I help her?"

"She didn't want to say," said P.B.

She didn't want to SAY? How mysterious! Surely I would remember helping someone with something they didn't want to talk about in polite company?

Anyhow, there I was today, loafing about behind the counter, reading a book called The Answer which will apparently make me a billionaire, when up rushed a little blonde lady that I wouldn't know from a bar of soap.

She said, "I just wanted to thank you!" She put a box of chocolates on the counter for me.

Hmmm. I looked at her carefully. I couldn't say to her, "I think you have the wrong person." I didn't want to risk losing the chocolates.

She looked embarrassed and leaned in close to speak to me. "I'm the one who... um... well, a few weeks back... er ... my grand daughter ... she ... oh, she vomited on your floor."

"Oh! YES!" I said in happy recognition (as if it had forged a bond between us, as if from now on we would be forever spew-sisters, united in the memory of the trauma of that day. In fact, I think I'm going to call it 5/27 from now and carry a bucket around all day on the anniversary in order to commemorate it.)

"You were so kind and nice," she said. "So gracious." Me gracious? "And it was so awful! What a mess! All that vile red bile!"

"Well, I have to say, I did wonder what...'

"Beetroot and watermelon," she replied sadly, as though it was something to be ashamed of that her grand daughter had only eaten beetroot and watermelon whilst under her care.

We had a great laugh over it and after she had gone, I ate all of the chocolates by myself because it was so quiet and boring and because they were there. It was only a small box but it was more than one ought to eat in a single session before the sun is even over the yard arm. After that, for a short while, I felt in danger of barfing all over the floor myself.

the trolley wars...

Like I said, stock day is a big day - not least because of the voluminous amounts of heavy books you have to get from the pallets at the front of the shop to the tables all over the rest of the shop. By voluminous, I mean lots. Big big lots and then some more on top of that. The stock is delivered at 7:30 a.m. and has to be unpacked and hidden away from the delicate eyes of the public by 9 a.m. at the latest. It's well over a thousand books we have to move by hand in an hour and a half. How do you do that? How is it possible???

Well, sneaking off with about twenty Woolworths trolleys helps enormously.

You see, we don't have a delivery entrance where those big ugly pallets can be slipped in secretly and unpacked under cover so that the public is never forced to confront the ugly reality of restocking. No. The big ugly pallets are rolled up on a pallet jack and unceremoniously dumped out front of the store to sit there like big ugly blocks of crap, four foot by four foot by four foot, jamming up the doorway and threatening to injure the unwary customer which would of course, force up the company's public liability coverage. If you have ever worked retail, you will know that this is the biggest disaster that can possibly happen. Bigger than North Korea and their pesky nukular bombs. Bigger than that game the Western military are still getting beat at - Where's Osama? Bigger even than Susan Boyle's nervous breakdown.

When I began the job, they told me that the best way to do this crazy little thing called restocking is to get the books stacked away under the tables as fast as you can and then simply take them out again, a few at a time, at your leisure and put them wherever it is that you've decided they should go.

Now, this is a beautiful dream of course and if only all the things in life that sound simple actually were.

But the fact is, as difficult as it is to carry over a thousand books around a very big shop, there is something even more difficult and that is bending over to put them on the floor and then pushing them under a table at the same time as you try to hold up the damn plastic tablecloth with your shoulder. And just in case you're not tired and sore just from thinking about that, then there is the part where you have to reverse the process and take the mongrel bloody things out again!

But I am smart! What is the use of being modest about it? Some of us have it and some of us don't. I solved the problem of the bending down while carrying twenty kilos of books and then having to do it all again backwards in a way that is efficient, fun and cost effective.

What we now do is get about twenty shopping trolleys and one by one, park them right beside the pallet we're unloading, stacking the books straight off the pallets and into the trolley. When we are done, one of us runs the trolley to the back of the shop and out through a door which leads to a magic land known as the Old IGA Supermarket.

It's an enormous space dotted with the things from all over the shopping centre that are no longer useful. It's almost spooky. Correction - there are times when it is definitely spooky. Princess Bookaholic and her fertile imagination have been known to get decidedly uncomfortable out there. The base of the old supermarket aisles are still there, stretching away to the back of the mostly empty space - they make it look like an abandoned bowling alley. Old wiring hangs down from the roof and unwanted shop fittings from hairdressers and such like lie about in untidy heaps. If you thought the decor for Dollar Hair looked cheap before, you ought to see the sad pile of busted green and black neon signs and excess navel rings that lies just beyond the back door of the Incidental Bookshop.

Ours is the only business that opens onto the old supermarketand we use it to our advantage in every way we can. The very best use we have found for it is to stow trolley loads of unpacked books in there till we get around to packing them properly on the tables. It reduces the lifting and carrying to a very manageable level and in return, all it takes is a little wheeling and dealing and a lot of hiding.

Hiding, I hear you ask? What on earth would we need to hide from?

Well, for a start the Woolworths managers who very unreasonably think that if we need trolleys to run our business we ought to buy our own. Let me tell you, it's not easy taking twenty trolleys in the front door of a shop on the sly...

... to be continued

stock day...

Every two weeks, a very special thing happens at the Incidental Bookshop.

Princess Bookaholic, Sir Laurence the Indispensable and The Incidental Bookseller arise at the crack of dawn and hurry on down to the Incidental Bookshop where a parade of strange men deliver, with varying degrees of competence, a couple of pallets of new stock.

Oh, the stories I could tell of Stock Day!

But I'm tired and my back hurts and it's time I was in bed so I will just tell you today's saga very quickly.

Our stock is all warehouse overflow and so we never really know what's going to turn up with each new delivery. The sad truth is, we get whatever hasn't sold elsewhere or whatever someone somewhere ordered too much of. Today they sent us about one million and seventy five novels and about forty five thousand craft books. In amongst the novels are a set of classics - The Great Gatsby, Jane Eyre, The Picture of Dorian Grey, Lady Chatterly's Lover... You get the picture.

Princess Bookaholic began to salivate the moment she saw this fantastic new intoxicant. Classics. In a set. Cheap but not too nasty. This is really beginning to look like her drug of choice for the day.

She loves those books. She spent two hours taking them off the pallets where they had been packed messily in no particular order and arranging them into the above pictured display. The Jane Austins are all together. The Victor Hugos are all together too. The horror stories form a single vertical line down the right side. Apparently there are other examples of the new order that Princess Bookaholic imposed upon this crazy mess of books but I don't know what they are because, even though she explained them all to me in detail, I wasn't actually listening.

On Stock Day, you can't get caught up in anyone else's literary triumphs and tragedies. Head down and bum up. If someone's little house of books topples, you have to detach - you have your own Pooh Bear, Dr Seuss and How to Win Friends and Influence People to juggle.

Anyway, once the worst was over, after the cardboard boxes were all opened and the ugly empty pallets hidden away out back of the shop, Princess Bookaholic served a customer. Her Majesty's head was still obsessing over the beauty of those affordable unabridged paperbacks she'd been sorting all morning.

"Do you like the classics?" she said to the customer by way of making conversation.

The customer looked at her like there was something a bit wrong with her and said, "No, mate - my family all like country and western."

wraapt in plaastic...

It was a big day today in the Incidental Bookshop.

We gave the old girl a bit of a face lift. You think I mean 'a bit of a face lift' in a manner of speaking, don't you? Well, in fact I mean we literally gave her plastic surgery. You see, the company I work for is like the SAS of book sellers, the Green Berets of the publishing world. We sell books at prices other book shops couldn't because we're prepared to go to places other book shops wouldn't.

Dumps. Places with no paint on the walls. Places with no carpet on the floors.

My shop, for example, is an enormous old barn of a place in the biggest shopping centre in our small city. It used to be a discount supermarket till a few years ago but since they closed that down, the space has been boarded up and the resulting walls decorated with the art work of local kindergartners. You might think that's a bit tight, using free paintings from little kiddies to make it look like they are a community minded kind of shopping centre. You might think to yourself, 'Jeez, guys fork out some cash and buy some REAL paintings...' But let's face it, who doesn't like to look at finger-painting after incomprehensible finger-painting as far as the eye can see along the boarded up former frontage of old IGA Independent Market?

Luckily for everyone, last Christmas the company sniffed out a bit of an opportunity there and opened a gigantic discount book shop. I say lucky because it means that finally we saw the end of the fingerpainting madness.

But there was a small problem. Once unboarded, the space behind was putrid. How do you get around that when you don't want to actually spend any money on fixtures? Well, what you do is you get miles and miles of shiny red or green plastic wrap with the company logo all over it proclaiming "BARGAIN BOOKS" - it comes in enormous rolls about three foot wide and god only knows how many metres long - and you staple it to the walls. You wrap the grubby old tables in it as well so that it falls like a curtain hiding that grubby old table's grubby old legs.

I know! I know! It sounds awful! But it actually comes up pretty well. In the weeks leading up to Christmas, the place sold and sold and sold. It sold so well they decided to keep it open and see if it continued to sell after the Christmas rush.

It died down considerably of course - but it paid its way and some weeks still did exceptionally well. So here it is nearing the end of May and we're still going.

But let's be honest here - it's an illusion. It's like The Wizard of Oz. "Pay no attention to the dump behind the flimsy plastic wrap curtain!"


Children poke at it and pull on it all day and as I mentioned in yesterday's entry, also occasionally vomit on it. It takes a skilled surgeon to keep up with all the nipping and tucking required. Sometimes, as I tape yet another patch of plastic wrap to a table straining under the weight of hundred discount books, I'd swear I can hear a little voice crying out from the darkness underneath, "I cannah hold 'er-r any longar-r, Capt'n!"

And so today was refit day.

Sir Laurence the Indispensable, a knight of the Order of Designated Ladder Climbers, came to my assistance as always. We pulled down all the daggy old red plastic wrap and put up shiny new green plastic wrap. We interspersed lengths of shiny green wrap which says over and over "BARGAIN BOOKS" with small snappy red posters that say "BOOK BARGAINS". There are a couple of ugly looking poles that just hang there in the middle of the shop doing nothing very useful except perhaps to hold the ceiling up. I wrapped them barber pole style with red wrap that says, surprisingly enough "BARGAIN BOOKS". It was a big job. A big big job.

Look, I know it's rampant commercialism. I know I'm exploiting people's addiction to consumerism. I know it's just plain tacky. But guess what? I love it! As I behold my bright green and red book cave with its fluorescent lighting, I smile to myself and say, 'Lo, it is good.' Not out loud though - that would be strange.

This entry has reminded me of Twin Peaks which I was completely obsessed with when my kids were small. My older daughter has grown up into the kind of person who would love the series so I suggested we get it out on DVD and watch it together.

She thought this was a great idea and told me that she remembers Twin Peaks from when she was small. Not the show itself which she didn't watch - but the ads, all of which contained a visual of a body and the words "... wraapt in plaastic..."

She was five or so and didn't know what any of it meant but somehow through those ads, she came to associate plastic wrapping with death and thought it was the normal thing to do - that we are all wrapped in plastic before being plonked into the old coffin.

Later on, when she had begun to read for herself, voraciously but dyslexically, she encountered the common phrase 'the late and unlamented' for someone who was not missed in death and therefore somehow neglected.

For several years she thought it said 'the late and unlaminated' and found it sad that some people could be so unloved that they had no-one to wrap them in plastic after they had died.

did you really have to bring that up?

Today, a small girl vomited all over the floor of my shop.

I was on duty by myself and I heard a plaintiff voice cry out from the depths of our cavernous shop, "Excuse me, could I have some assistance down here?" In the very back aisle of the store, a small grandma type woman was struggling under the weight of the heaving retching child in her arms.

Ugh.

I hurried to her side and instinctively extended my hands to help her in any way I could. Then I realised that she, the child and a three foot radius of shop floor were covered in red lumpy vomit.

Double ugh.

I instinctively retracted my hands again.

"She's not very well," said the poor Grandma.

Hmmm. You can say that again.

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry," said the poor Grandma.

"That's fine," I said. "You just get her home. I'll take care of this."

Translation: Get your barfing granddaughter out of my shop.

I called Customer Service and asked if they could send a cleaner around to fix it for me. Well, no, Customer Service explained - the cleaners won't clean inside a shop. It's not their job.

"But," I said, "If you ask Jo, she'll come and help me. She is the GOOD Cleaning Lady."

Customer Service explained that they couldn't call Good Cleaning Lady Jo directly. The request would have to be radioed through to the EVIL Boss Cleaning lady who is none too happy at the moment because her company just lost the cleaning contract on the whole centre.

I wondered how Customer Service could tell the Evil Boss Cleaning Lady was particularly unhappy. She has always been one of the most bizarre and miserable women I have ever had the opportunity to observe in her natural habitat. Evil boss cleaning lady takes her job description seriously and it is NOT in her job description to clean up after any of the staff of any of the shops. In fact, we are not even supposed to put our rubbish in the bins. Those bins are provided for customers, says Evil Boss Cleaning Lady. I once put a small piece of cardboard in one of the centre's rubbish bins. She saw me do it and took the cardboard out of the bin. She very deliberately placed it on the floor all the while looking me in the eye. It was like some kind of crazy challenge.

I dare you to put your rubbish in my bins again.

She straightened slowly, still eyeballing me like John Wayne, in any number of his movies, putting the uppity heathen Injuns back in their place.

I double dare you.

"I'm afraid you're on your own with the vomit situation, dude," said Customer Service. Yes. It's true. The girl at Customer Service calls me 'dude'.

But my question remains - what could this woman do that could possibly make her seem even more unhappy than usual? It's kind of scary really.

I was on duty by myself, as I said, so I couldn't go out to get cleaning gear. I have the basic equipment in the shop of course - a broom, a cloth, a bottle of disinfectant spray - but nothing of the caliber required to combat the kind of damage a projectile vomiter can inflict in a matter of seconds.

And the smell! The smell was permeating the entire space. Customers were streaming out the door. I had to do something!

It's amazing how much you can achieve without inhaling when you must. On my haunches, armed only with tissues and Orange Magic spray clean, I managed to mop up almost all of the mess.

Then as I stood up, I looked out through the front of my shop and saw the cavalry riding down the corridor to my rescue. Well, actually, it was two cleaning people - Good Cleaning Lady Jo and Nice Cleaning Guy Brian pushing their cleaning carts. They were accompanied by Kent, the Centre Manager.

Well, that little spew had certainly caused a kerfuffle, hadn't it? Kent is pretty cool. He strides about the centre with his trusty walkie talkie ever to his ear, just about the only man in our small tropical city who still wears a tie to work. He made a Kent joke as he approached. "What's this I hear? You vomited all over your floor? What'd you do that for"

"I got bored," I replied. "You know how it is."

Everyone thought this was pretty funny. I said to Jo, "I thought you weren't allowed to clean in my shop."

"Kent told me to," she replied innocently. "What was I supposed to do - say no to KENT???"

Kent's chest expanded a little at the mention of his power.

Jo and Brian went forth with mops, both wet and dry, and small spray cans filled with overpoweringly pleasant odours.

As they finished swiping their mops back and forth, ridding me at last of the contents of that small child's over full stomach, I said, "Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you! You are so good to me."

Jo said matter of factly, "Well, you're always good to me too."

It's true. Just that morning I gave her a tiny discount on some books for her kids. It dosn't matter that the amount is small, it's just that everyone likes the acknowledgement that what they do is appreciated. Same with the security guards. All of them repay me by looking after me above and beyond the call of duty.

A lot of people think that Kent and those like him have the most important jobs in these kind of places - but the truth is, Kent went away for a holiday and nobody even noticed he was gone.

Try going a week or even a day without cleaning staff and security. God love 'em.

the whole Harry Potter and Twilight thing...

I know I'm late to the Harry Potter discussion but for Book People it's a debate that never really goes away. It raises its head again nowadays with the gobsmackingly popular Twilight series. I haven't read it myself - I don't do vampire romance (or Kills & Wound as I like to refer to it) but my daughter is a bookaholic who has to try every new book she sees and she tells me that Twilight sucks like a Hoover on crystal meth. We don't actually sell the series in The Incidental Bookshop but if only we had a dollar for every starry eyed tweenage girl who comes in asking for this tale of unrequited blood lust... Well, even a cent would do; we could still buy a small island and a lifetime supply of garlic to keep all those smoulderingly angsty vampires away from us.

So, does the fact that the Harry books and now the Twilight series are generally not considered great writing negate the fact that they have made avid readers out of millions of kids who have never before willingly picked up a book for pleasure?

My own opinion is that great writing is in the mind of the reader. If fifty seven and a half million people want to read the latest installment of Harry Potter so badly that they can't wait till nine a.m for the shops to open and start queuing hours before dawn like crazy people in order to make sure they get a copy, then it's good writing. It might not be MY kind of good writing but it's certainly doing something right in the communications arena.

Let me tell you what Harry Potter fever was like at my house. I've never had even the tiniest smidge of interest in Harry Potter and neither did my older daughter the bookaholic.

But my younger daughter did. Well, she's not all that young really; she's going on nineteen now and is reading the series from start to finish again, as she rides the train, day in, day out, to her boring job.

She has never been interested in books. When she was a child she was always on the move, up and down trees, on and off bicycles, and when she was a teenager, she was always on the phone, always on the lookout for action, except for the week after the latest Harry Potter came out. Then she was a different kid, in her room with her head in the book till she finished it. Six months before the final Harry book was released, she told me she was buying it the moment it came out and straight away locking herself in her room . She vowed she would not answer her phone or read a paper or the surf the net till she had finished it in order to avoid spoilers.

I remember one day when she was seventeen and the latest Harry movie had just come out, she said to me at about lunch time, 'Let's go see Harry Potter.'

I looked at her like she was mad and said, 'I hate Harry and besides I have work to do.'

She stuck her lip out like she used to when she was three and went off to her room.

The next night, she came out of her room and said, 'Let's go see Harry Potter.' This time I laughed in her face. She stuck her lip out like she used to when she was three and went back to her room.

I sat there trying to work - but then I got to wondering how long it was since she and I last went to the movies together. And how long it had been since I had made that common parental sacrifice of going to a movie I loathed just because one of my kids wanted to see it.

It had been a while.

Somehow I found myself at the web site of the local cinema and found there was a
9 pm session that we could make if we hurried.

So I knocked on her door. I went in and said, 'Let's go see Harry Potter.'

'Really?' Her face lit up and she literally jumped up and down for joy just like she used to when she was three.

I remember it was just coming on winter and I am such a sook - I don't like to go out in the cold. I said to her, 'Hey, do you think it would be okay if I wore my moccasins?'

She said, 'Your what?'

I said, 'My moccasins.'

She said, 'Those black furry things?'

I said, 'Yeah.'

She said, 'They're slippers, mum. Stop fooling yourself.'

So away we went. As I remember, I changed my shoes and the movie was tolerable. It didn't turn me into a fan but what a great night it was - to be walking into a cinema on a cold night with my girl smiling by my side.

On the morning the last Harry Potter book came out, she was there, as threatened, at the bookshop at the crack of sparrowfart to pick it up. She cuddled and kissed the book on the way home in the car, taunting herself by flipping it open to the last page but stopping herself from reading what was there.

Then she got this really wistful look on her face and said, 'Oh, mum - why can't I be a wizard? ... Everybody who's anybody is a wizard nowadays. A wizard or vampire slayer. I am so boring!'

I said, 'Yeah, I know what you mean. I'm just a vampire wizard slayer myself and jeez, I can hardly keep my eyes open, it's so dull.'

She said, 'Don't be ridiculous, mum - there's no such thing as a vampire wizard slayer. Everybody knows that.'

I looked at her like I imagine CIA agents look at people when they talk about their jobs. 'Yeah, well, that's what we want you think.'

self help books and the psychiatrists who loathe them...

I read recently that psychologists have finally taken a small step towards acknowledging that many of the strategies recommended by the stupendously popular self help movement actually work.

Well, duh!

Oh, I shouldn’t be sarcastic. Why wouldn’t mental health professionals feel threatened by a movement that seriously impacts their livelihood? Let’s face it, the advice we give our sanity challenged associates has increasingly changed from, ‘I’ll give you the number of my therapist.’ to ‘I’ve got a great book you can borrow.’

Self help books get around the world faster than swine flu rumours around the internet. Self Helper One buys it and is so impressed and de-stressed by the self-help it contains that he cannot wait to pass it on to Self Helper Two. Self Helper Two is in turn so radically enlightened by the information that she no longer needs assistance and hands it on to Self Helper Three. Self Helper Three is days away from embarking on a bus tour to Darwin and won’t have time to finish before he leaves. Could he possibly take it with him? But of course, Self Helper Two insists. After all, a large part of helping yourself is helping someone else. Self Helper Three reads the book on the bus and is so excited and enthused and determined to shake off his past that he leaves his luggage on the bus and walks off into the Northern Territory desert to become a roadie for a passing Aboriginal rock band . He leaves the book in the pocket of the seat in front of him where it is later found by a beautiful Swedish backpacker who can't work out why, for all her blonde locks and long legs and big jugs, she still can't find love. She eventually gives the book to the long term companion it helps her find for his second cousin who is in jail for defrauding the generous Swedish social security system and then... Well, you get the picture. By the time that adventurous self-help book, dog eared and spine broken, finally ends its journey in a dusty second hand book shop in Glasgow, it has passed through the hands of no fewer than fifty struggling people, leaving them a little happier and wiser.

Let’s do a little comparison shopping. Say a therapist charges $80 an hour, one session per week and that on average each of his patients stay in therapy for a year. That equals $4160 per patient. On the other hand, the self-help book which cost Self Helper One $15.95 has made fifty sadder people wiser at a cost of 0.319 cents per Self Helper.

We are talking the Little Psycho Babble Engine who Could here. We are talking the featherweight champion of the mental health world, punching way above his weight. Self help books made me the woman I am today - still mad as a one armed traffic cop but comfortable that way.

Some of my favourites:

The Road Less Travelled by M. Scott Peck. This book fundamentally changed the way I looked at the world . I can't thank the author enough.

Men Who Hate Women and The Women Who Love Them by Dr Susan Forward. After I got myself out of a bad relationship, this book helped me leave it behind. Truly. It wasn't me, it was him.

Creative Visualisation by Shakti Gawain. Your world is created in your mind. If you can conceive it, you can achieve it. You are the master of your own ship and all of that cliched blah blah blah. But guess what? Cliches get to be cliches by being fact. This stuff is so true, you can take it to the bank. It's so real, you can taste it.

Of course, there's a lot of dross published as well, a lot of complete tossers writing self help books that help nobody but themselves, but you get that in any field. The general philosophy of self help is that we should each take responsibility for every aspect of our own lives and that includes the responsibility of not swallowing, without due examination, anyone else's philosophy . If ever you were duped by some slick talking positive thinker, self help tells you to thank him kindly for the lesson in how not to get duped a second time.

la belle et la bete

I was looking at one of the gorgeous kid's books we have in the shop at the moment - a beautifully illustrated version of a dark medieval fairy tale.

It reminded me of the time I was reviewing for the local paper and the editor forced me to go see a local production of Beauty and the Beast. Yes. You heard me a local amateur theatre production of Beauty and the Beast.

I was like ... Aw... Do I HAVE to?

And they were like ... No, of course you don't have to. And you don't have to do anything for us ever again either ...

Then I was like … OK! OK! I'll go watch the talentless local show-off hacks bring to life an immortal Disney classic…

You know what I hate most about immortal Disney classics?

They're immortal.

Jeez! Die already, Nambi Bambi and Stuperrella! And somebody disconnect Sleeping Beauty's life support system, for god's sake!

But guess what? While the music for Disney's immortal classic Beauty and the Beast was, is and always will be bloody atrocious, and the sweetness of the tweaked for the twenty first century storyline almost requires an insulin shot to process, it's a phenomenal yarn!

Where do I start? There's a such a lot to this tale of trauma and transcendence. Such a lot that a girl who was always considered nice enough but kind of weird, who always nearly, but never quite, fit anywhere she went, a girl with nameless longings and an awful fascination for the beastliness of life, could identify with. In short, a girl like me.

First of all there is a handsome prince, of course. But the handsome prince happens to a prick who thinks he is better than everyone else. He's cruel to an old woman who, unfortunately for him, is an enchantress. She turns him into a beast to teach him a lesson and her spell has a punchline – he shall remain a beast until he genuinely loves someone who genuinely loves him in return. So you have a beast in a suit, a bitter man-beast with no manners nor consideration for others. A man beast who shakes his fist at cruel fate and blames everybody else for his beastliness.

How Freudian can you get?

Enter Belle, a girl who doesn’t fit in, who is a little bit different, who the lovely mob of plebs in the village take great pleasure in mocking.

And so of course they fall in love and both are transformed. Blah blah blah – how banal and so forth. How boring! And yet, it’s a true thing, the transformational power of love. It may be the truest thing in the whole world. I’ve seen it happen time and time again in others and even had it happen to me. There was not a thing in the world that could have made me willingly leave a warm bed in the middle of a cold night till I was changed forever, for the better, by the overwhelming love of a baby who needed me.

Anyhow, for Belle and the Beast, it’s not the normal course of an affair at all. They despise each other at the start and must work their way through the whole beastliness issue before coming to accept both themselves and each other. Then, of course, he is transformed and voila! - he is actually a gorgeous human being underneath the selfishness – as are we all!

The original story was written in France in the 1700s by a writer named Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve. It was a dark tale full of all sorts of Jungian shadows. It was abridged and lightened up about twenty years later by Jeane-Marie Leprince de Beaumont and I’d like to complain about this whitewashing of the story but in fact, it’s unlikely we’d know the story at all if it hadn’t been homogenised for public taste.

“Villeneuve's version of the tale also differs from Leprince de Beaumont's in its eroticism and its insistence on the Beast's monstrosity. Villeneuve makes explicit the transgressive sexual union at the heart of this tale. Not only does the Beast repeatedly ask Belle to sleep with him (in Leprince de Beaumont's version he asks her to marry him), but Belle has pleasurable dreams of being courted by a handsome prince. The transgressiveness of these descriptions is intensified by details of the Beast's frightening appearance …” answers.com

I wish I had enough French to understand the original story. But I don’t so I will have to make do with pale translations. Jean Cocteau apparently made a fabulous film version called La Belle et La Bete in the 40s. If I were just a little more of a film geek, I might buy it. But alas, I too am a pale imitation of a true film geek and will have to make do with the pale imitation of the stage version that I saw at the local theatre.

Imagine - a story with a truth so strong that not even an amateur theatre company and an overdose of Disney tunes could kill it!

come the revolution, all bookshops will be run by writers...

I am a bookseller.

But I'm not primarily a bookseller. My highest calling is that of Creative Genius but unfortunately the world hasn't yet realised this and so, I am forced to supplement my meager living by selling books. It's not so bad. Quite sexy in fact at times, when the new stock comes in and there are all those luscious taped up boxes full of unsullied books wanting nothing more than to give up their retail virginity to me. To me! Ooh, it feels so GOOD! Suck it and see for yourselves, all you green eyed book monsters out there. A writer who is also a bookseller. Maybe there is a god after all.

Still, satiating as it can often be, being a bookseller is not an afternoon at the beauty spa. Selling books is hard work. It is at least as hard as writing them - this I know because I have done both - and it is most certainly much harder than reading them. Well, most of them anyhow. I'm sure we all have a difficult book in our past, the reading of which was the frustrational equivalent of having your eyes sandpapered out of their sockets by an angry soccer hooligan. But that is food for another blog...

Now, to the specific aspects of the general difficulty of selling books.

1) Physically, the most difficult thing is that BOOKS ARE HEAVY. Carrying one lonely book from the kitchen to the front veranda to sit in the morning sun and sip a fresh made coffee is no great imposition, it's true. But now I want you to close your eyes and imagine carrying ten or fifteen of the suckers from the back of the shop to the front and then carrying the ten or fifteen that were at the front down to the back for no apparent reason except to participate in the mysterious ritual of 'rotating the stock'. When I first heard of 'rotating the stock', I tried cheating by just picking up a few books at a time and turning a quick circle. But it didn't seem to help sales at all so I stopped doing that - I felt it may have made me look a little bit silly.

2) Emotionally, the most difficult thing of all for a Creative Genius like myself is DEALING WITH THE PUBLIC. The Public, in case you didn't know, is a seething mass of crazy idiosyncrasy*. They want the impossible yesterday. When you offer to order it for them by tomorrow, they huff and they puff and they finally grudgingly agree to wait the extra day for whatever impossible thing it is that they can't live without. So you run around like a cat with a dead rat strapped to its tail and procure the preferred impossibility for them. You dutifully, smugly even, have the impossible sitting there waiting for them to pick up and while they're about it, give your ego a quick but hearty touch up. You know, say something like, "Holy shit! How the HELL did you ever manage to get this impossible thing for me so swiftly? Who are you really? SuperBookGirl? You're astonishing! You're fantastic! God, let me slip you an extra tenner just for being so damn clever" and other suchlike things.

Now keep in mind, this is only what I think should happen, what I am expecting to happen, what God has decreed should happen to all diligent book sellers who go beyond the call of duty for a customer who desires the impossible.

What actually happens is that they don't even bother to pick it up at all.

After a week, you put it back on the shelf sadly. Another week later and you feel glad when someone else buys the impossibility - it hurts too much to see it there, a reminder of your magic making gone unappreciated. Another week later again and the original customer comes back and wants to know where their impossible to find book is. When you tell them that you sent it home with someone who actually wanted it enough to give you money for it, they call you names and walk out, vowing never to return. It's cruel and unusual and I don't know how I go on sometimes.

3) Finally, spiritually, the most difficult aspect of selling books, the roughest, the most soul destroying, is that you somehow have to stop yourself from standing around all day reading the stock. Or not.

Seriously, it's a burden.


* Why don't we just cut out the middle man and spell idiosyncrasy with a z? Idiosyncrazy. That says it all.