Category Archives: Big Stone Gap

Just an Update

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Jack and I have talked it over, and we figure this blog should run Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. Jack will be handling Wednesdays. I enjoy writing the blogs, and it’s so nice to hear from people who like reading them. But the shop is getting messy while we putter at the computer…..

Today, just for fun, I’m rerunning a post that elicited the most comments (and likes) to date. It’s also really snarky, so it’s good for Christmas. Teehee.

DEAR JAMES PATTERSON (June 26)

Dear Mr. Patterson,

I’m sure your mom loves you; probably you’re a nice man who is good to dogs and small children, and you try not to run over any manatee in your private pontoon boat near your inlet coastal home.

But frankly, dude, I am so over you.

My husband and I run a used bookstore, and not a week passes that one of three things doesn’t happen:

(Sorry, did you follow that okay? I’ve read a couple of your books, so understand that you prefer simple syntax.)

1)      The door opens and someone staggers in bearing a box full of battered mystery and thriller paperbacks; about 1/3 of them are yours. The others will be Mary Higgins Clark, Danielle Steel, or Patricia Cornwall. (Not that your private life is any of our business, mind.) The person trading these in will dump them on the table and head straight for classics, waving a dismissive hand behind him- or herself. “These aren’t mine; a friend was moving and said I could take them. Never read trash like that. Have you got any Hemingway First Editions?”

2)      The door opens and a customer comes in asking for you (your books, I mean; we all know you don’t get to Southwest Virginia very often.) I point out the shelf you share with John Grisham (again, your private life is your own) where we now stash you for $4 a paperback, $6 a hardback; it just saves time, not having to price you every day. The person scans quickly, then frowns. “These are old. I want the newest one. Why don’t you have it if you have all these?”

3)      The phone rings and someone offers to sell us “a really valuable set of books.” Three times in five, sir, they are talking about an entire hardback collection of you. We explain that we don’t buy books for cash, and they become irate. “This is a really popular author! Everybody reads him!” Yes, we know. We have a growing stack of this popular author’s older hardbacks creeping up the wall in one corner, because they outgrew that Grisham/Patterson shelf. One day some of our foster kittens were playing nearby, and the pile collapsed. You just missed committing multiple felinicides, James me lad. Wouldn’t that have made you feel terrible?

So, Mr. Patterson, we just want you to know–and no hard feelings–that we kind of hate you. Nothing personal, but you make us feel like book pimps instead of erudite scholars. Plus, your customers are so … loyal. We suggest a Kava, plead with them to try a Jance, lead them to Scottoline, even beg them to consider Hillerman or Stabenow. We extol variety as the spice of life.

Nothing works. It’s your spiciness they crave, Mr. P, you who have filled used bookstores everywhere with your 1,2,3, nursery rhyme titles, with your “same-plot-different-characters” smoke, mirrors, and adverbs routine. You are giving the readers exactly what they want.

{Sigh}. And that’s why we hate you.  So now you know, and I hope you can still sleep at night, riddled with all that guilt.

Sincerely, Wendy and Jack, proprietors, Tales of the Lonesome Pine Used Books

P.S. Please do not send any of those men who read your novels professionally for ideas, to rub us out. We are small town people and would have no defense. Thank you.

 

Book Betrayal?

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I came back from my first-ever SIBA (the Southern Independent Booksellers’ Alliance) conference with a box of some 100 books thrust at me by reps, readers, and some people I think had just crashed the hotel. I triaged these into “not my thing,” “not normally my thing, but let’s try” and “Oh boy!” piles on the long shelf beside my bed.

They made a satisfying bulwark against boredom, and I congratulated myself that, at two books a week average, I’d be reading through them well past Christmas. Of course they got mixed in with new books authors sent for our stocking consideration (we’re getting about one a week now) and the piles got bigger. But then a funny thing happened.

My expectations changed. I found myself reading, not for the satisfaction of the stories, but to determine if I liked the author’s methods. I was reading…. oh dear God in heaven, help me…. only to see if I wanted to sell them.

Sure, I like cozy tales about inherited wedding dresses and chasing down the stories of the brides’ lives from 1902 to 2012. But that’s kind of a trite idea, so it has to be done with really compelling writing. A steampunk send-up of Jane Eyre? Yes, please–so refreshing to fracture a famous tale without using vamps or zombies. I could tell customers about that one with enthusiasm.

That bedside wall of books that was going to take me cozily under covers through the Holidays dwindled faster than the plot line of a Cornwall thriller, as I assessed, summarized, speed-read for basic action ideas, and otherwise treated these books like commodities.

And went through them at a rate of two per night. No slow savoring, no “catch me with your phrasing, reel me in with your descriptions, still me with your elegant prose.” Just, “Yeah, got it. Next.”

Selling used books is a different world than new. Apparently I had slipped unaware through the portal. In the freewheeling, forgiving world of second-hand, not every book pulls its own weight. And eventually, even the oddest books find people who want to love them. It’s more like an adoption service, a recycling center, a retirement home. Communal, not capitalistic.

Now I was doing cold hard “yep, this’ll sell, this won’t” separations of the sheep from the goats.

But . . . I like goats. . . .

Maybe we’re not ready to be new-book retailers, God Bless and Keep Them. I don’t mean what they do is in any way less than what we do, just different, vastly different.

We like our cozy little slow-life retirement and recycling center. And–let’s face it–eventually those hot new commodities are going to land on our shores anyway. So maybe we’ll just wait here in the rockers. . . .