Two Stories from a Mom & Pop Bookstore

Bookstore Register #3

I'm a second-generation secondhand bookseller building the used bookstore of the future. Join me every other Tuesday as I learn the family business, curate news from the book industry, and celebrate books as the pinnacle of art and the foundations of civilization. This was originally called Bookseller’s Register.

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My family’s bookstore is a true “Mom and Pop” enterprise: if you come in, the most likely person to be working behind the front desk is my Mom or my Dad. 

All day long, they interact with customers, many of whom are “book people.” I think book people are among the most interesting people in the world. So it makes sense that they have some of the best stories. In the future, I will profile a few long-term customers, but the last two weeks were “back to school,” so I was busy and wanted to keep it light. 

So for this issue, I asked my Mom and my Dad about their funniest one-off encounters with bookstore customers. Below, I’ve rewritten what they told me.

Mom’s Story

About fifteen years ago, the bookstore used to be open on Sundays. For weeks, there was one guy who came in every Sunday afternoon. He was a tall, older guy with white hair who had obviously just come dressed for church. We’re no longer open on Sundays now because they’re so slow, and often this guy was the only guy who came into the store. 

My Mom would watch the store most Sundays. (It was my job in high school). But this guy made us part of his routine. I don’t know how to be delicate about this so I won’t be: this guy would show up every Sunday, make the minimum amount of eye contact possible, pour himself a cup of free coffee, grab the same book, and take a huge dump in the bathroom closest to the front of the store. 

It’s good he was the only customer because the whole place would reek. If it were to happen once, it would be unkind to make a joke out of it, but this guy did this every freakin week, at the same time, for a couple of months. It became a running joke just because of the absolute gall of this guy, to come in, grab a book, relieve himself, stink up the whole store, and then NOT buy the book. He would put it back! 

(Cue my Mom telling the story: “Like, gross! We can’t sell that book now!”)

He was also coy enough to slip in and out somehow avoiding eye contact or waiting til my Mom was on the phone so that she couldn’t talk to him. Finally, after five or six visits, my Mom was sitting behind the desk on the phone and he started to walk out. Mid-call, she puts the phone away and says, “hey!” The guy stopped dead in his tracks, with a shocked look on his face. And she says, “I’ll make you a deal on that book.” 

This guy has the nerve to look at my Mom like she is the crazy one. Then without a word he left, and never came back again. 

Dad’s Story

(Note: The bookstore was opened in 1993. When it first opened, we got a decent amount of foot traffic. We then launched a website and started selling online on various marketplaces. The online sales really took off at the same time that foot traffic started to decrease about twenty years ago. Ten years ago, when this story happened, we were in the midst of reinvigorating the foot traffic to the bookstore, so we were looking at what customers expected. Now, in 2023, foot traffic is higher than it’s ever been.) 

Around ten years ago, I had strong ideas about what the bookstore customer service needed to be like. I was a typical young man in my mid-twenties. I had all the best ideas and new ways of doing things, and I suggested such innovations as ‘routinely answering the phone’ and ‘checking the voicemail every once in a while.’ 

My Mom and Dad fulfilled all the orders people made online. They also talked to every single person who came into the store, but they said that doing much more was unnecessary, and the things I was suggesting were a bit too much. 

It was during one particularly banter-filled conversation my Dad and I were having about this that he challenged me to call the store and check the voicemail. 

“I check it all the time!” He said. “You’ll see, there’s nothing going on. There’s nothing important.” 

I called, and the first message I heard made me laugh so hard I could barely breathe. “Who is that? How did you put him up to this?” I asked my Dad. 

My Dad was legitimately surprised, so I dialed back in and gave him the phone, and he heard what I heard. A guy with a low, soft-spoken voice, who sounded like he was calling from inside a closet, left the following matter-of-fact message: 

📞“Hi, uh, it’s about 6:10 PM. I think that I am locked in your bookstore. All the lights are off and the front door is locked. I called the number of the store but it just rang here. I am going to let myself out the back and leave. I just wanted you to know that I was here and it wasn’t someone breaking in. My number is (713) 555-5555.” 📞

My Dad had a big belly laugh. Then he took out a pen and paper, wrote down the phone number, and put on his most serious face to call the number back. 

“Uh hello,” my Dad said, “Yes this is Dan from Becker’s Books. Yes, hi. Yes, of course. Please tell me-” my Dad smirked at me “-how you managed to breach the security system.”

My Dad went on to ask the guy point blank if he stole anything, which the man denied. And then my Dad invited him back to the store, and reminded him of the store hours, 11:00 AM - 6:00 PM, emphasizing the “six P M” when he repeated them.

We still have a good laugh over both of these. 

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Update

📚 Total Inventory 1,480 | Inventory Since Last Issue 10📚

I’ve been out of town, but I managed to organize my processes and get some books processed and into the inventory. (On the email there was a typo and it said 0—the number of books processed since the last issue is actually 10.) Below is my favorite book I came across while processing.

Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers

This book originally caught my eye because you would never see a cover like this on a book published today. Somebody hanging from a gateway like that would be so taboo, even in effegy (and probably for good reason). But I decided to include it for what I found when looking it up.

It’s a popular book from an author who I hadn’t heard of. And I thought that the blurb on the inside cover was so interesting. It’s raving about the series, which is centered on a character who is compared to Sherlock Holmes. 

But it was the Goodreads reviews that really stood out to me. I like using Goodreads reviews as a proxy for popularity and how strongly people feel about these books. There are almost 30,000 reviews on this book published in 1936 (this copy was republished in the 1970s). 

But then reading the reviews, all of the top reviews as far as I can see are multiple hundreds of words long. People really feel strongly about this book, almost universally in a positive direction. Sayers is often compared to Agatha Christie, which I gleaned not only from this review but from being in the book full of Agatha Christie novels. But then you get comments in reviews like this: 

And comments like this: 

And now I think I might read this book myself. These are the kinds of books that remind me why used bookstores are so wonderful. To find this beaten-up old book by an author I don’t know, with a cover that many would find unpalatable, only then to look it up and find that readers call it mind-expanding and rich in myriad different directions, this is something that can only happen in a used bookstore. 

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Links

Seinfeld - George’s Toilet Book

I couldn’t not include this hilarious bit from Seinfeld about how George Costanza had was like the guy in my Mom’s story.

AI-Created Art Isn’t Copyrightable, Judge Says in Ruling That Could Give Hollywood Studios Pause

This is a fascinating article on the state of artificial intelligence in creative works.

U.S. copyright law, she underscored, “protects only works of human creation” and is “designed to adapt with the times.” There’s been a consistent understanding that human creativity is “at the core of copyrightability, even as that human creativity is channeled through new tools or into new media,” the ruling stated.

Even though this won’t affect used bookstores for years it will trickle down. At the end of the day, AI’s (specifically most LLM’s) are just predictive models that reassemble people’s words. At the core of the premise of used bookstores is the idea that authorship is important. While technology can be used to augment and extrapolate human genius, it is no replacement.

‘I can’t stress how much BookTok sells’: teen literary influencers swaying publishers

This article about the effect of TikTok book influencers on brick and mortar sales is so interesting.

Groups of teenage girls regularly gather here to buy new books and meet new friends, both discovered on the social media app TikTok. Recommendations by influencers for authors and novels on BookTok – a community of users who are passionate about books and make videos recommending titles – can send sales into the stratosphere.

But while very much an online phenomenon, BookTok is having a material impact on the high street, with TikTok now pushing people to buy their books from bricks-and-mortar booksellers through a partnership with bookshop.org, which allows people to buy online and support independent bookshops at the same time.

It touches on shopping patterns, generational changes, technology, in-person vs. online, shopping, and a few other interesting topics.

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See you in two weeks! Please let me know if you enjoyed this, and what you would like to see covered in future issues.