Tag Archives: Jack Beck

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.

Patience–or a Good Single Malt

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Wednesday is Jack’s blog-writing day. Enjoy!

Patience is a virtue, and we haven’t got any in our bookstore. Wendy and I regularly have some permutation of this conversation: “Nobody ever buys [sports/economics/self-help/old decorating books] so let’s get rid of them.”

Then, just before we gather them into a box for crafting purposes, someone comes to the check-out with a beatific smile and an armful of the “impossible sells” and says something along the lines of “It’s so hard to find these nowadays! How delightful that you have some! I’m going to tell everybody about this place.”

I think it’s a combination of wanting a tidy shop, finally coming to the end of our shelf space (Do you hear that, Wendy?!) and paranoia that we’re wasting what little we have left when it could better be used for a popular category: to wit, Vampires.

Oddly enough, the “wait patiently” game reminds me of when we sold our 1706 gatehouse in England before moving to the States permanently. The real estate man told us that because it was a quirky historic property we shouldn’t expect to sell straight off, but rest assured that somewhere out there someone was certainly looking for just such a quirky 1700s historic property. All we needed was patience. And sure enough, eight months later, he was proven right.

Patience, and single malt.

So we try to have patience, reminding ourselves that there is a book for everyone, and everyone for a book. Especially at Christmas, when desperate shoppers pick up things like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and say, “He likes travel; this’ll do.”

It’s the thought that counts. And of course, when the thoughts bounce off the target, we’ll be seeing those books back again. Ah, yes – back again? Patience, dear!

It’s all part of the circle of bookshop life.