Towards the end of my stint a man came up to the desk and asked if we had Cold Sassy Tree.
"Wow. I don't know if that's even in print anymore," I said, looking it up. It is in print, it turns out, and the computer said we'd received a copy last fall and it was still supposed to be on the shelf. As I was leading the customer to the paperback fiction section, he asked me if I'd ever read it.
"Oh, yeah, years ago. I barely remember it. When I first started working here people were crazy for it and we sold a ton of it."
"Did you like it?" he asked.
"Well..." I hedged. An honest answer would have been, "Eh. Not really." But since I'm in the business of selling books, I try to combine honesty with the realization that my tastes don't always coincide with others'. "It was all right. It's not really my kind of book."
The customer frowned. "I'm directing an opera based on it and I thought I should read it." By now we'd reached the shelf and I was scanning for the lone copy. It wasn't in its proper spot and it wasn't anywhere in the vicinity. I straightened up and looked at this guy closely for the first time and realized he was somebody. Not Somebody, but definitely a minor celebrity who, I believe, had once been a regular on one of the Star Trek spin-offs. I apologized for not being able to find the book and offered to order him a copy.
"Oh, no, thanks," he said. "I didn't really want to read it."
"Well, it is more women's fiction. Sort of literary lite. But hey, you're going to direct an opera! That's interesting."
He grimaced again, suggesting he wasn't all that excited about the gig. "I'm afraid the opera is going to be literary lite-lite." What a ringing endorsement for his own artistic endeavors! Then he asked for some history books on Syria, which he is going to visit in the near future, and I completely failed to find anything useful for him.
I'm a bad bookseller.
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