Tag Archives: bookstores

Shelving What Matters Most

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Last night, with about a hundred things to do to get ready for tonight’s murder mystery in the bookstore (starts at 7, if you’re in the neighborhood) I wound up culling our online inventory.

You know the drill; it’s a form of avoidance therapy we’ve all practiced, this sudden need to do a job that’s been sitting around for weeks and has nothing to do with the urgent things before you, but just at that moment the planets align and there could be no better thing to do with one’s time than….

…reconcile the printed inventory list of 452 books with the titles on the online shelf. Mostly these books are hard to find for some reason and thus in high demand. The list being very dynamic, it’s a tussle to keep the right books on that shelf. Hard to find cuts both ways.

So I went at it. With my husband one floor below me installing a floor for our new bedroom (took him only eight hours; we’re very proud!) and foster kittens sullying the mystery room with every passing moment, despite baking and cleaning and last minute “how did this get there” tidying to be done, I grasped the list of titles firmly and spent 2 glorious hours playing a game of solitaire with books.

Is the book on the shelf? Fine, mark it off the paper list. Is the book on the list but not the shelf? Search the bookstore section it should be in. Is the book AWOL? Make another list. After all, tomorrow is another day.

When it was over, the bookstore was in chaos. Piles of mis-categorized books on the table. Gaping holes in the online shelf where books were falling over, falling off. Dust from ancient tomes everywhere.

Most satisfying. I cleaned up the debris, then made a half-hearted start at my “to do” list for the murder. As it turned out, things weren’t nearly so awful as I’d supposed. Pick up a dog toy here, straighten a shelf there: twenty minutes, and the place looked good. Screw the baking; we’ll serve ice cream sundaes.

Work expands to fill the time allotted it. If I’d given it two hours, I’d have found two hours’ worth of tidying. But you know, the time spent among the books, happily alphabetizing and culling and imposing a sweet sense of order on a random corner of the universe – well, sometimes it just does a body good to putter. Let the mad world whirl by; the books and I had a grand evening.

Friends or strangers?

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Jack’s Wednesday guest blog returns –

Now that there is some time and distance between us and our Istanbul jaunt, we’re beginning to analyze our experiences. Although we greatly enjoyed many things there were a few bumps along the road as well and that’s what I’ve been thinking about.

Coming from a very small town to spend 12 days in one of the biggest cities in the world was always going to be a bit of a shock to the system and there’s no doubt that was a contributory factor, however there’s something else at play, I think. As tourists staying in a busy up-market hotel in the middle of a historic part of Istanbul surrounded by tourist oriented shops we were very conscious of being just part of a ‘passing trade’ and easily categorized as ‘rich pickings’. However we didn’t consider ourselves so easily pigeon-holed. We are ourselves shop-keepers who deal daily with customers (some of whom are tourists) and we like to think we treat them all as individuals and interesting people in their own right.

All of this got me thinking about the times we felt most comfortable during our Turkish adventure. Not surprisingly it was when we felt we were interacting with people as fellow human beings, talking about shared concerns. Mustafa the carpet seller in his shop across the street from our hotel; Okay and Samet who worked in our hotel; the manager of the tour office at Ephesus; the yarn shop owner who invited us in for tea after we’d bought from him and it didn’t matter anymore. Mustafa chatted happily with us about his family, hometown and world travels; Okay laughed when we named the local cats we’d photographed after hotel employees and took our concerns on board when we were fleeced by a restaurant; Samet talked of his ambition to study Sociology in the US; the office manager went from bland indifference when we arrived in the morning to real genuine concern when Wendy arrived back in the afternoon feeling unwell. It must be very hard to relate to strangers who cross your path fleetingly as customers when you are so dependent on them and very tempting to see them as ‘cash-cows’ to be milked and then forgotten about.

Maybe it’s because we live above the shop and the line between our personal lives and our business lives is fairly blurred, or maybe it’s because in a small town many of our customers are also personal friends, but we really appreciated those times when we seemed to emerge from the masses and be recognized as ourselves in the frenetic surroundings of Istanbul.

In the end these are the memories that will outweigh the blips – the counterfeit 100 Lira bill, the wayward hand in Wendy’s pocket in the Grand Bazaar, the heaving crowds and bizarre fashion show at Ephesus and the missed briefing when we arrived at the hotel – they will recede while the good bits remain.