Category Archives: bookstore management

Two countries separated by a common language

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Jack blogs about language woes

I’m really not good at remembering names of customers (and not much better at faces). So I have a fall-back position of asking anyone who comes in if they have been in before or if they are looking for anything in particular. That’s when my secret weapon comes into play – my Scottish brogue! It usually produces exclamations of delight in return, people asking where I’m from, saying their great-grandfather came over from Scotland–although not always. Sometimes it results in blank looks or very confused responses, like “Hunh?”

It took a while before I was able to work out what was wrong, but finally the penny dropped. It wasn’t the accent so much as the vocabulary.

I frequently say that it’s a pity the Founding Fathers didn’t stipulate that everyone in the US would speak Sioux or Cherokee or another indigenous language. That way anyone coming here from the UK would realize that they’re in a foreign country and not assume that they understand the locals (or vice-versa). For instance I used to say, “The book you just ordered will be here within a fortnight.” The customer would stare, then mumble, “so – my books will be here in four nights? Could I pick them up the next morning?”

It seemed that writing the date of delivery would be easiest, until I realized that in the UK, we write the day first, and it is month first in the US. Still, this did clear up why my church kept singing Happy Birthday to me on May 2nd instead of February 5th.

A wee antiques shop lies not far from our bookstore, and people often ask how to find it. Directing someone to “turn right at the bottom of the steps and walk a hundred yards up the pavement” garnered funny looks as well. In the UK the sidewalk is called the pavement and the pavement is the road.

Then there is the issue of the fresh shortbread I make; I once extended a plate to a woman with the invitation, “Care for a biscuit?” She looked very suspicious.

But not as suspicious as the lady whose phone number I was writing down last week. When I misheard her, I found the eraser didn’t work. So I said, “Oh, one moment, madam, my rubber is malfunctioning.”

She hasn’t been back since, that woman.

Because I Say So

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Some “rare yet regular” customers who visit family twice a year were here yesterday. As the husband browsed Classics, he asked, “How do you decide which books are classics? I mean, I can see anything by Nathaniel Hawthorne, but you’ve got Joyce Carol Oates here, too.”

Jack gave the usual response: “If we like them.” Which caused the husband to guffaw.

There’s nothing quite like running one’s own shop. No corporate manual: “If the book is older than 75 years and has been assigned to more than one literature department in two disparate American states, OR if the book is foreign and written within the last 20 years and has been assigned …”

Peh. We thought Eileen Goudge and Louise Erdrich had good things to say, so there they sit in perpetuity, conversing with Faulkner between them. Of course, if I had my way, John Irving would be in the bargain basement, but one does bend to certain commonly-held sensibilities.

It’s the Margaret Atwoods, Cormac McCarthys and Robert James Wallers that prove tricky. They’re in, they’re out, they’re hot, they’re not, a movie’s getting made…. We joke about putting up a revolving shelf with the heading “Your 15 Minutes Starts Now.”

But for the most part, we find few people worrying about what’s where. If you can’t find it in Southern Fiction, try Classics, then General Fiction or Historical Fiction. Most serious second-hand book  shoppers WANT to browse. It’s part of the pleasure, to crack the code and get into the heads of the bookslingers organizing that particular shop. That’s how you know you’re on the inside, when you can tell other people where to find Ludlum, Flynn, Higgins and Forsyth–Mysteries and Thrillers, or Guys with Big Guns (aka Westerns and War)?

OK, that’s a trick question, because on any given day, Jack will stick them in one category, and I in the other.

A bookshop divided against itself cannot stand. I finally put a note on the Mysteries and Thrillers room door: “If it’s a political thriller having to do with spies or war, try the Guys with Big Guns room first. Because that’s where Jack puts them.”

It’s upped traffic back there. And earned my husband sympathetic comments.