landingtree

I'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.

I'm covering Evelyn's* shift today at a local bookshop, Bookhound: my first real experience of retail! Writing this now because there aren't a lot of customers. So far the shop has earned slightly more than it will be paying me, but that may change: no one has bought anything since noon.

The first sale I made, I did wrong. Leaving a note to say 'The Crowded House book was paid for with cash actually.'

A customer reported a complaint: we had sold him a book that was incomprehensible gibberish. I told him I'd get in touch with the author to prevent this from happening again.

Someone wants to leave flyers here for their new skincare parlor up the road, do we do that? Stashed in kitchen pending approval.

I'm used to thinking of shopkeepers as panoptical; in reality, customers could have stolen a dozen books from the genre alcove and I wouldn't have noticed, unless they made the mistake of beginning to act sneaky.

I was advised to bring an activity to do which wasn't a book to read, so came with a jigsaw, but the owner (who we know, and is lovely) had left something else to do: art books to cut out paintings from and put up on the walls. Next to Fantasy I have stuck a washy green city with a fort, a windowpane of a flooded forest, and a brown cellist vanishing into his background. I have also made a new 'Please ring for assistance' sign out of Henry William Kirkwood's 'Mitre Peak.'

(I'll leave it to the owner's judgement whether this calm image of an empty boat in a mountain wonderland is going to be more annoying to waiting customers than plain text. I have discovered that from the kitchen I can't actually *hear* the bell that rings for assistance, so am ducking out and in rapidly when necessary).

A homeless man came here to get change for a tenner; I assume we do that?

I'm so used to being a book-buyer that whenever I sell a book my first impulse is to hold onto it. One customer did actually have to 'Frodo Baggins the ring is still in your pocket' me.

(Do we sell the new books which are in the kitchen? Someone wants the first Harry Potter; the system claims we only have book four, and the only book I can see is three. Luckily the customer wants the first, so I have time to check. Since they seemed open to substitutions (Lemony Snickett) I'd have recommended Flora Segunda as an alternative if I'd noticed it on the shelf).

A customer reports that we have every book in two different series except the ones they're up to. We agree stoically that such is life.

Edit: Oh good, we just sold Sacred Signs and Sigils, that covers my next hour's pay. That's two books sold out of the window, I have never bought a book out of a window and didn't know windows were this effective. What shall I replace it with?


Edit: 3 pm. Now I am trying to collage a mysterious spaceship into Charles Decimus Barraud's 'Hutt River'. It isn't working very well.




* When I named Evelyn in a past post I forgot I'd decided not to use whole names of flatmates; however, Evelyn okays this!