Category Archives: shopsitting

Bookstore? What bookstore?

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Ever have one of THOSE weeks?

This week, returning from Istanbul and diving into wrapping up the semester at the college, I have logged less than three hours working in the bookstore. My loving spouse has been carrying the place solo as I careen from car to class to meeting to car, stopping only to fling my body horizontal in a darkened room for five hours at a time.

Yeah, it’s a first world problem. I’m playing catchup partly because I got to spend twelve days meandering the streets of Old and New Istanbul, hand in hand with my beloved. And when we got home, shopsitters Mark and Sally had left the place immaculate and organized.

That was Monday…. by Tuesday evening 12 big boxes of trade-ins sat on our bookshop floor. Clearly, some customers had been waiting for us to return.

My amazing husband was on his hands and knees in the back of the store last night, triaging the last of the paperbacks. I patted him on the shoulder as I raced past. Modern marriages are wonderful things.

And yet, in the midst of the chaos, beneath the burden of all that must  be done, there is a weight that doesn’t so much push down as hold up.

Wednesday past, as I turned out the light much later than I wanted to in preparation for climbing the stairs to bed, I stood for a few moments in our dark, calm bookstore. The walls were lined with books, silent sentinels of so many lives. Testimony that many had gone before, and survived, thrived, even recorded their journeys.

And I breathed. That smell, that lovely smell of dust and ideas–and lemon scent; our cleaner Heather is amazing–worked its way into my rapid-fire lungs. And I slowed down a little.

Just for three minutes, I stood, breathing. Just breathing. This too shall pass, this present cloud of bustle. Busy ends of the semester will return to summer beach readers and long, leisurely glasses of iced tea–or cups of hot tea–with customers who are friends, stopping by to ask about titles, offer reviews, show us their child’s report card.

It’s a good thing to have the weight of books in one’s life. Then I climbed the stairs to the bedroom, where on the left side of the bed a lump lay. The other anchor to my life, Jack, snored softly. Just breathing.

Fast food, furious grading, fast driving, faster meetings and all, I have the most wonderful life.

Reading People

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Arabic is read from right to left, European languages left to right. Some Asian languages read in columns, while others are like pictographs; get all the info, then go back and build the meaning of the sentence (sort of like German, when you have wait on the verb).

With many ways to read books, can it be a surprise that there are even more ways to read people?

Sam (Samet) worked at our hotel in Istanbul; he used the book analogy when we had a lengthy conversation about the hospitality industry, its economic engine and the subtle nuances of human relations that meant the curtain between “you paid me to be a servant to you” and “how are you enjoying your stay” had to stay down–no matter what accents, expectations, or accidents.

“It is like, every person who comes in this hotel is a book, and you must read them, but not all the lines. They have a whole life elsewhere, but here they want maybe something similar, maybe something different. You have to read very specific lines, look for the messages that are important, and not be distracted by the rest,” he said–in amazing English.

(Sam’s a smart kid, age 25. He’s also tall and movie-star handsome with curly hair, so you can just imagine what the population of wealthy retired world-traveling women who frequent his hotel offered him to read. Jack and I got a real kick out of watching him in action.)

IMG_3876His insights were echoed by Mustafa (43), the carpet seller across the street who willingly spent hours with us recording interviews. From the outlying provinces, “Moos” had been in Istanbul only 18 months. “I was born on a carpet. My mother made them, my father sold them wholesale. My brothers and sisters and I, everything we knew was carpets.”

It became evident as we talked that Mustafa regretted for himself the university education he intends his son to achieve, but also that he and his cousin (and business partner) relished being “cultural ambassadors. We teach the Middle East. We know carpets, how they made, the dyes, who is making them. We teach people every day, we are not just taking money. But we must have money or the shop closes.”

Behind this, Mustafa and Ahmed actually relished discerning who was inside the customer standing before them, what he or she wanted from the whole experience of buying a carpet. “Some people rich. They want a carpet only to prove they rich. They don’t touch, just ‘what is most expensive? OK, that one.’ Some people see a color, they fall in love, some people you talk into buying, some people you can never talk into buying. It is half work, half fun, this talking.”

IMG_3925Selling books, Jack and I read the customers who present themselves, trying to get them right. Back to front, straightforward, any hidden messages? It seems that, in every country, no matter the product, reading people is what makes a good shopkeeper. So Jack and I traveled 5,000 miles to find mirror images of our daily life in the people we met and the work they did.

We kinda like that.