Tag Archives: used bookstores

Who Would be Brussel Sprouts?

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This morning I went to our town’s farmer’s market, held just a convenient block away from our bookstore. As I meandered among the potatoes, carrots and kale, inhaling nice smells and greeting neighbors, a thought crossed my mind: how is a bookstore like a farmer’s market?

Yes, there’s that locally-run, mom-n-pop element, but I mean, what if the books were the vegetables? Digesting ideas, digesting vitamins….c’mon, play along; this could be fun.

Every farmer’s market has plenty of root vegetables, the underground foundations of what we eat. Starchy, solid, and below the radar? I’m nominating Norman Mailer as the potato bin of the bookselling world: stodgy, yet palatable. Filling, and most certainly omnipresent.

How about kale? It’s maybe the wee bit tricky to make tasty, but it’s a staple filler of any reasonable diet. If you can’t eat it straight, try cooking it in soup. I suggest Jessamyn West. Like kale, she’s been around a long time; like kale, she’s rich in fiber; and like kale, she’s been condensed–into reader’s digest hardbacks during her heyday. (If you’re not familiar with West, she wrote The Friendly Persuasion and Except for Me and Thee. Both give you plenty to chew on without much that’s hard to swallow–like kale.)

Now, the peppers are just coming in: sweet green and red bell peppers, yellow banana peppers, and those spicy, innocuous-looking Scotch Bonnets, hotter than any jalapeno. The Bonnets are easy: Philippa Gregory. You can look like an intellectual while getting your bodice ripped, the same way throwing in a Scotch Bonnet makes you look like a gourmet cook when in reality no one will taste anything else. Spicy peppers in moderation are rather good for you, too, and Gregory has a surprisingly adept turn of phrase plus a few realisms stuck in all that spice. And the heat covers the overdone bits.

Banana peppers – well, those are usually pickled, so let’s say Tom Clancy?

For the bell peppers, sweet yet slightly crisp, I’m going to suggest Maeve Binchy. Her stories are fresh, invigorating, familiar in plot yet tantalizing in delivery. Like a good stuffed pepper, she holds a lot of ideas in that sweet, simple framework.

At our farmer’s market, usually at least two stalls sell baked goods and one has homemade candy and other sweet stuff that’s really bad for you and not filling at all.

Danielle Steel.

And finally, we have that luscious genre of berries: blackberries, raspberries, blueberries, gooseberries. For these, let’s say cozy mysteries (you know, the murders that take place in bed and breakfasts, or antique stores, or are solved by women running coffee shops). Having varying levels of juiciness, stomach satisfaction, and cost, they share much with the berry family. Also, like berries at the market, cozies are ubiquitous in any bookstore.

All this playing around does leave a question unsettled in my mind, though: Who would be brussel sprouts? Any ideas?

Playing Solitaire with Books

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There’s something very satisfying about shelving books in a bookstore. It generates calming enzymes, creates its own zen. I come home from a day job fraught with trying to make people see things they don’t want to see, and tackle a stack of books to let people see what they want to see, find what they want to find.

Organizing a bookstore’s shelves is no easy matter; T.S. Eliot wouldn’t have called it one of your holiday games. But it is fun. Take a stack of disorderly novels strewn about the front room table, sort them into genres, then heave a stack into your arms and march them to their proper places. O before R, Ch before Cl; like solitaire, shelving books requires just enough brain power to keep your mind occupied, yet not so much that you feel drained by it. It is the perfect restoration of harmonious balance to tired, misfiring neurons.

You can’t stay mad while shelving books. The Inuit say it’s bad to eat food cooked by an angry person, because the food absorbs the anger and people will choke; books also absorb your thoughts and feelings, but in a different way. As you’re handling titles, perhaps you come across one you read as a young’un: Winnie-the-Pooh, Paddington Bear, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. You might even open it to a random page, and smile a wistful, childhood smile. Thus the day’s chaos sifts away, book by book, smile by smile, as you remember where you were the last time you read the tome in your hands, be it mystery, a classic, even horror. Hey, at least Robert McCammon’s people have it worse than you; they’re getting devoured by werewolves….

And you discover things, mostly on the shelves, but sometimes in your own head. While you’re finding gems you remember reading, or books for your to-read list, your brain is thrown into concentrating on something else. Before you know it, little thoughts you didn’t know were sprouting, back there in the hidden recesses, begin to bud and blossom. You get ideas. You get restoration of time.

You get calm.

Once, in a town an hour away from my bookstore, I met a business associate for coffee. It was going to be a fairly difficult meeting, since (in a nutshell) I needed to convince her to do something my boss wanted, that really wasn’t in her best interests. Being early, I browsed the second-hand books the shop had for sale, running my fingers along paperback spines–until the cashier’s voice broke in.

“Ma’am, I said, can I help you?”

I glanced over at the college student staffing the register; she looked perturbed. I followed her gaze–to my chest, against which I held a small stack of Mary Balogh romances, which I had been busily sorting into families and reshelving.

Once a bookseller, always a bookseller. The trilogies were separated, after all; likely the poor little books were frightened and confused, alone in that big wooden world… I gave the cashier a friendly nod. “No worries! I’ll soon have this set to rights!”

So I don’t meet colleagues in that coffee shop any more, but the point is, it makes us happy to be the masters of our own domains, and a bookshelf is a particularly satisfying wee fiefdom. Jack and I cater to customers with our shop’s layout, but I have friends who shelve by author; by title; by categories of their unique making like “mysteries that have dogs in them,” “novels featuring knitters or book clubs or other gatherings” or even “books I liked enough never to loan out.”  My friend John has a set of shelves on one side of the room for books he’s finished, another on the opposite wall for books he’s going to read.

It makes us happy to create order from chaos, even if our organization looks chaotic to others. So if you’ve never tried it before, treat yourself and give bookshelf sorting therapy a whirl. You might be amazed at what you discover on your shelves–and in your own mind.