More Bookhound
Nov. 26th, 2023 07:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
landingtreeI'm very much enjoying working in a bookshop. My first customer service job. It's relaxed, which is partly because my employer is lovely and partly because we don't have enough customers. My employer has been working the shop for years, and also without much in the way of days off for the month before I was hired. Understandably, she seems pretty sick of trying to run a bookshop that makes no money, and intends to sell up. In the meantime, it feels good to get to come in as the person who isn't yet sick of it. Besides having fucks to give, and a fresh eye to turn on things which had cemented into annoying problems, I can advise on boardgames and S.F. Today I merged Science Fiction and Fantasy, because I never like browsing them as two sections; also this way if the Steerswoman books come in I don't have to choose where to put them. And I moved book two of The Mallorean, book three of a late Orson Scott Card trilogy, and our duplicate copy of part one of book four of A Song Of Ice And Fire to the cheap sale bins, along with several massive dog-eared tomes I'd never heard of and two or three comic fantasies whose protagonists get uplifted from pleasant lives in the hamlet of Hubble-on-Wimble by the Wizard Grabfart in order to be illustrated by Josh Kirby. If any of these are gems then someone will be very pleased to pick them up for five dollars.
Those customers we do get we get frequently compliment the shop. It's a light, pleasant space to be in. There were renovations earlier in the year, and every day I work there, someone says, "Oh, it's all changed! It looks better!" The only customer so far who could be called a problem was the man who told us that one of the Newtown bookshops, either us or the anarchist bookshop up the street, had sent someone to his house to purchase some books and had not been heard from since. There had been a deckle-edged Shakespeare worth a pretty penny, he said. When we told him we never collect books from houses, he said hmm, well, that's very strange, and repeated the story to us two more times. Then he came back the next week and said it all again with greater intensity. Clearly he thought that somebody was lying to him. I don't know if he's mixing up suburbs (he is sure he's not) or if someone's running a book-buying scam, or what. I have heard only good things of the anarchist bookshop. If my employer is a book thief and I get gradually inducted into Wellington's underworld, I shall let you all know.
Those customers we do get we get frequently compliment the shop. It's a light, pleasant space to be in. There were renovations earlier in the year, and every day I work there, someone says, "Oh, it's all changed! It looks better!" The only customer so far who could be called a problem was the man who told us that one of the Newtown bookshops, either us or the anarchist bookshop up the street, had sent someone to his house to purchase some books and had not been heard from since. There had been a deckle-edged Shakespeare worth a pretty penny, he said. When we told him we never collect books from houses, he said hmm, well, that's very strange, and repeated the story to us two more times. Then he came back the next week and said it all again with greater intensity. Clearly he thought that somebody was lying to him. I don't know if he's mixing up suburbs (he is sure he's not) or if someone's running a book-buying scam, or what. I have heard only good things of the anarchist bookshop. If my employer is a book thief and I get gradually inducted into Wellington's underworld, I shall let you all know.
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Date: 2023-11-26 11:24 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2023-11-27 01:34 am (UTC)