You must be able to play "the game" to work in a bookshop, and here's
the first rule: When a customer has a specific title request, assume
(but never let the customer know you assume) that the information
provided is flawed. In any three-word title, at least one word will be
incorrect; sometimes two; sometimes all three. I've heard titles that
were close (Snow on Shingles for Snow Falling on Cedars) and not so
close (Peggy Sue and the House of Hair for Patty Jane's House of Curl).
Decoding misinformation is not, however, a problem for a frontline
bookseller; it's one of the pleasures. I was reminded of this once more
last weekend, when a customer asked me to help find a book her daughter
needed for school. She showed me a slip of paper, on which the "title"
was written: Robert Fagles. The solution, reached with relative ease
after a few questions, turned out to be the Fagles translation of The
Iliad.
That's one way the game is played, though she probably could have found
the answer eventually using an online bookstore search option.
But what happens when the request defies intellectual and digital
gravity? Shortly before Christmas, I fielded a question from a man
frantically scanning his scribbled list of gift suggestions for
relatives.
"Do you have any books about Osama Barick," he asked.
I knew, even if he didn't yet, that he must be looking for Barack
Obama's bestseller The Audacity of Hope. It was an easy leap of logic
for me, but would that answer have come as simply online? A lot of time
and money is invested in some very powerful search engines, but even
high tech logic often meets its match when confronted with the low tech
intangibles of consumer bewilderment and impatience.
What if the gentleman had looked for an answer to his relatively
simple, if opaque, request at bookstore Web sites? I conducted a quick
experiment to find out.
"Osama Barick" yielded no results at Amazon, Borders, Politics &
Prose Bookstore, Powell's Books or Tattered Cover's BookSense.com site.
Books about Osama Bin Laden came up as hits at Barnes & Noble and
the Northshire Bookstore. Even almighty Google was puzzled by this
request.
Perhaps the game, an integral part of bricks-and-mortar bookstore customer interaction, has no equivalent online.
There's a wonderful description of the game in Sheridan Hay's The
Secret of Lost Things, which will be published in March. In the
bookstore where much of the novel's action occurs, the staff is adept
at a game called "Who Knows," loudly pooling their varied and
idiosyncratic skills to answer unfathomable requests, such as a
customer whose "hands might move apart, as if to say 'it's about this
thick.' " Hay writes that "the only reliable source of reference was
the staff and their collective memory."
Memory coupled with well-honed instincts. Often, niceties like author
or title won't even be part of a demand. Booksellers must decode clues
like "a book I heard about on NPR last month" or "a book that was on
display last week over there" or "a book with a red cover my friend
bought here."
The "red cover" is a classic. George Orwell wrote about it in his 1936
essay, Bookshop Memories: "For example, the dear old lady who 'wants a
book for an invalid' (a very common demand, that), and the other dear
old lady who read such a nice book in 1897 and wonders whether you can
find her a copy. Unfortunately she doesn't remember the title or the
author's name or what the book was about, but she does remember that it
had a red cover."
What booksellers really do, on our own or with colleagues, is play
tag-team mnemonics. Customers enter the store with raw materials,
garnered from conversations, misremembered ads and half-heard radio
interviews. They deliver the clues and want rapid, even magical,
revelation of the title. They scatter beads across the counter and ask
us to hand them back a necklace . . . immediately.
Do they have the same expectations online? I suspect they give up more quickly there.
If the game is being played well virtually, I'd love to know where and
how. I've seen little evidence of it in my bookstore Web siteseeing
travels. E-mail, listservs and search engines are useful tools, but
they are not really the game.
Imagine a bookstore Web site where the game could be played with the
ease and frequency of the sales floor version.--Robert Gray (column
archives available at Fresh Eyes Now)