books, books, books

I think I'm spending too much time around books lately.

Not a statement anyone ever expected to hear from me. I majored in literature, after all. I work in a bookstore and a library. My room is crammed with books. I can't even count the times I've woken up with a book next to me on the pillow. I love the way books feel and the way they smell. I enjoy helping people find just the books they're looking for.

Still, there's a point when it feels like I'm taking my work home with me. One of Mom's library books was lying on my desk on its cover. The back of the book had a stylized R and the word "Revell". "Oh," I thought to myself, "Revell is the Christian-themed imprint of Baker, whose books we buy from J.A. Majors." Or I noticed a Scribner book in the living room the other day; that's Simon & Schuster. Each week I update the bestsellers for our store; Saturday I did the lists and only had to look up one of the publishers. For all the others, I knew the imprints already (Grand Central is Hachette, Vintage belongs to Random House, Riverhead is one of Penguin's and so on. For the record, the one I didn't know was Washington Square Press, which turns out to be part of Atria, which is an imprint of Simon & Schuster.).

While this is great in a way, because it lets me get done with the spreadsheets-and-order-forms part of my job faster and go on to the rearranging-the-displays and hassling-the-cashiers parts, it's also somewhat alarming. What if I suddenly develop a social life? I won't be able to hang out at bookstores, that's for sure. The people at Barnes & Noble have better shelves than I do, and more of them. They also have their own imprint, which makes me shake my fist every time a customer wants a book that's only available at Barnes & Noble. Heaven forbid I ever get invited to a party. I'd probably be standing around jabbering about multi-press conglomerates and how mysterious it is that the big presses don't seem to actually send out their books on time. As it is, I spend more time on the phone with HarperCollins and Von Holtzbrinck than I do with my best friend. It's gotten to the point where I know which companies have the best hold music (not Perseus - Enya makes me want to take a nap).

I suppose I could do something with this knowledge, like start an indie press movement. We'll listen to peppy music and only buy books from small, expensive, tough-to-contact independent presses! Yeah! Books that nobody would ever want! Or I could irritate people by poking through their collections and pointing out that they seem to buy all their books from one group or the other. I could write an exposé about the irritations of restocking fees and shipping delays that get us the bestsellers a week after they've fallen off the list or why the price-gouging students complain about at university bookstores is mostly a bunch of whining. Nothing much compared to ground up rats in the sausage, though.

I suppose in the end my bookstore skills will be just about as useful as any other specialized skill set, say playing bridge or understanding a dead language (neither of which I can do): sometimes entertaining at parties, but not a lot of practical applications outside of the field. Ah well. That's why I went to a liberal arts college, right?