Tag Archives: bookshop management

Jack’s Take on (parts of) Philadelphia

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Jack gives Wendy an afternoon off to take a long, hot bath, and offers his impressions of the glorious charm that is Philly.

In the 1980s and early 1990s I toured around Europe with my folk-band Heritage and then, with my band mate George, branching into the States. The book tour on which Wendy and I are currently engaged has reminded me very much of those days: driving long miles between gigs, meeting lots of interesting and engaging folk, and swinging between fast food and gourmet meals. Last night we stepped slightly away from the book activities to give a house concert organized by Eileen and Ray, the friends we stayed with here in Philadelphia (in the wonderful and palatial house of their friends Jean and Pat). House concerts are a peculiarly American concept, and this one was well attended by folk who joined in every chorus with more enthusiasm than I’ve experienced in a long time (including the rather silly ‘Railway Porter’ and the infamous ‘Counting Backwards Song’ which some adults won’t sing because they always get the numbers wrong). ‘Twas a lovely night.

This morning we discovered a real bookstore-owning character in the shape of Greg Williams of ‘Walk a Crooked Mile Books.’ The shop is half of an old train station and a gloriously riotous and ramshackle building on the historic register, with bookshelves stuffed everywhere you can imagine (including, to Wendy’s delight, the bathroom). Outside he has a ready-made amphitheater where he puts on frequent music events. Greg proved very willing to spend time chatting and comparing notes about the things bookstore owners tend to have in common: borderline poverty, endless boxes of donations, and the joyful exuberance of getting to run one.

Crooked Mile’s staff cat Cici sat silent and plump at our feet during our discussion. Greg said she hadn’t so much applied for the job as created the position; she appeared one day “and that was that.”

It is hard to convey the delight one feels at finding a kindred bookslinger. Greg is a shelf-building, free-thinking, problem-solving kind of guy with a long white beard and eyes crinkly with laugh lines. We started trading book questions: “Do you make people pay half in cash, or will you take all trade credit?” “What do you do with older paperback fiction?” “Do you ever get….” Etc. We did etc. for about an hour, until other customers entered and we said farewell.

Tomorrow we’ll tell you about our book signing at The Spiral Bookcase. Today, we bask in the glow of knowing there are other shops stuffed to the gills with the eternal library of human knowledge, run by bookslingers who know the value of what we contribute to the world.

BTW, Greg also writes a blog, which can be found at http://www.walkacrookedmilebooks.com

(Cici, the shop cat, proved camera shy. This is the best we could do.)

Whuffling Through the Social Sciences

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IN THIS EPISODE: Shopsitter Andrew Whalen gets more than he bargained for while trying to impose a little order on life’s chaos….

Things got a little too real today when I tore apart the “-Ology” bookshelf and set out to rebuild it. This shelf contains folklore, sociology, anthropology, self-help, career advice and research best practices.

At first reorganizing was fun. In a confusing world it can be comforting to establish hierarchies and draw borders. This is the appeal of the low-stakes nerd debate. Does it matter if Kirk or Picard were the better starship captain? No, but it feels good to put things in order (this one always seemed easy to me: one survived the reign of Kodos the Executioner, has the middle name Tiberius, passed the Kobayashi Maru test, and defeated conqueror-of-all-Asia Khan Noonien Singh… the other is Picard).

But some chaos cannot be cornered, tagged and boxed. Some chaos can only be whuffled, which is the word I made up to describe the sensation and action of bottling various fogs. Or the word I thought I had made up until I typed it into a search engine and found it used to describe sniffling, gentle affection and thankless online forum moderation. If we’re going by my definition (not endorsed by the Internet) it’s a feeling that accompanies so much of what we try to set in place. And the more I stared down the “-Ology” shelf, the more I begin to think the whole world is made of whuffle.

Yes, whuffle is verb, adjective and noun. It’s very versatile.

Before the “-Ology” shelf this uncertainty seemed very abstract to me. It came up primarily when considering genre. Is it fantasy just because there are swords? Is it sci-fi just because there are spaceships? Read Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun and get back to me. Welcome back. See what I mean? And that’s before we get into odd-balls like Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Thomas Pynchon, and Margaret Atwood. No wonder people just gave up and invented the term speculative fiction.

The “-Ology” shelf was supposed to be different. It represents entirely separate realms of human knowledge! It’s like a UN of social sciences, each field a tiny nation-state with its own territories and agendas.

But my distinct borders kept getting knocked down. What to do with Typetalk, which purports to be a study of the Myers-Brigg Type Indicator, but has self-help cover language promising to aid in determining how you “live, love and work”? Things only blurred more from there. When is a study on families anthropology and when is it sociology? Are Coping with Difficult People and Coping with Difficult Bosses really so different that they should be three shelves apart, one in sociology, the other in career guidance? ARGH.

So I started fresh, with a new theory. I could arrange the shelf like a continuity. There was a spectrum at play, beginning with psychology: the individual opening up onto the family, expanding into the society, then reaching out to other societies and forms of governance before finally drilling back down into the individual stories each society treasures. Brain to Folklore, with all of human experience in between. Made total sense for like two seconds. But things just got worse. And by the end I had almost convinced myself that Life-Span Developmental Psychology and Normative Life Crises was interchangeable with Folklore in the English and Scottish Ballads.

I look at the shelf now and see nothing but whuffle. No matter how hard we try (I’m looking at you, Dewey, with all your decimals) nothing exists entirely separate and apart. Categories are cool, but they are never definite. All things interlock and nothing is simple. But as maddening and confusing as that can get for the bookshelf organizer, it probably makes for a more interesting world.