Thought I'd peel back the curtain a bit here and show you all the oft-mentioned bookstore where I work. It's cozy, off-beat in the best ways, and endlessly intellectually stimulating; in a word, it's home.
And not without its quirks. We arrange the books in a kind of binary-shelving method. We have only five main sections: books that begin with "The"; books your mother would be ashamed to know you're reading; movie novelizations; miscellaneous; and origami. Within those sections we arrange the books not alphabetically by author or title, but by length. Short books on the left, long books on the right. FYI, the 261-page sub-section of each section is the largest. Of course, on that odd, once-a-month occasion when a customer comes in with exactly the correct title and author of the book he or she is looking for, it might take some time, but for everybody else (the scores who come in saying, "I don't know the title, author, or subject matter, but the book's kind of a cream color and it's about this thick," (holding out their thumb and forefinger, indicating a book of roughly 312 pages) "and I have to have it read by tomorrow for my book club," the system is amazingly convenient.
We don't have any author signings, because, frankly, who wants those kinds of people in a bookstore? Live authors, that is. Drake, the young Goth woman who runs our cafe, is also a medium (as in ghosts; her dress size is actually petite), and she offers her services gratis once a fortnight for an author seance in the back. Poe was a lot more garrulous than you'd expect, Austen a raving diva, Hemingway picked a fight with me when I innocently asked him if maybe A Farewell To Arms was a bit mawkish, and that Kafka was a stitch.
I mentioned the cafe. It's actually a small table near the water fountain (five cents a slurp, strictly enforced by Drake) with a "leave a crumb, take a crumb" plate. The restroom, unisex (we're progressive), consists of a pilfered key on a large wooden plank (Marathon station across the street, wink wink). The magazine section is filled with mags we scavenge from backpacks checked at the front counter.
Like any friendly bookstore, we have our share of alternative regulars. Alice is a card, and harmless (don't mind the flyswatter, that's just her way of showing affection); Orson gets a tad polemical, but if you hit the couch right after he wakes and trots off for the wooden plank, you can usually scrounge enough coin for bus fare home; Ambidexter's promised to reveal (figuritvely speaking, we assume) the truth this Halloween--my money's on male, Drake's vibrations tell her hermaphrodite; we're all convinced Suugeee is the one responsible for looting the entire shelf of 477-page "The" books every week or so, but she's so darn cute nobody seems to mind; Fred should be back lurking in the origami books in 7-15.
Oops, there's the sensor, got to run. Stop on by sometime. We're open occasionally `til dusk.
Everything But The Girl-Wrong
The Fall-Wrong Place, Right Time (No.2)
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