clayhornik | (no subject)

Happy Anniversery To Me.
Fourteen years as a bookseller.
I remember before John Grisham. Just barely. A little cardboard standee of the cover of The Firm, with a coming soon blurb on it.
The Road Less Travelled on the bestseller list, not going anywhere.
Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus. Longest time in hardcover to my memory, rivaled only by Midnight in the Garden of Good & Evil.
Advance Reading Copies. Lost Souls... gone, loaned foolishly to someone I was enamored with. Donna Tartt's The Secret History, read so many times that when I finally sat down and read the final release, I could find where lines had been cut.
A world before Amazon.com.
Books in Print in HUGE bound volumes. God, how I love it on cd-rom.

A world before main stream vanity publishing... now anyone can publish a book. This in NOT a good thing.
Arguing over weither or not we should carry American Psycho, first when it came out, then the re-release in the wake of the movie.
Final Exit. Couples arguing over it, a wife wanting a copy, the husband appalled.
Madonna's Sex. Somewhere I have video from the local news doing an article on it, featuring an interview with me.
Scarlett. Everybody wanted to know what happened afterwards.
The Blackman's Guide to Understanding the Blackwoman, parodied on In Living Color- "Give your woman an open handed smack to the face, " which wasn't too far from the advice in the book.
Getting promoted to children's buyer.
Jesus. All this was just in the first three years. Turn The Page. Gone but not forgotten.
Meeting Colin Powell when he was at Prince Books for a signing. A CRAZY signing- two blocks worth of customers.
Harry Potter Books, back when the NYT would allow kids books on the best seller list... Poor Grisham and Steel, getting bumped to the three and four spots.
Late night release party for HP4.
Hmmm. Trying to think of more interesting things that happened in the seven year stretch at Prince Books. Ah, the appearance of big box bookstores in Tidewater. We were able to hold our own at Prince because of personalized service. Amazon.com. Likewise. Customers would ask us if Amazon was better. We'd tell them to smell the books- can't get that online.
Oprah. How I hate her. Bookclub for lemmings.
Getting a copy of Cold Mountain signed before it won the National Book Award.
Annoying book collectors who don't care about books til they win an award, and have to have a first edition.
The ABA goodies box. At both Prince and Turn the Page, the ABA convention was like Christmas time. I'm still waiting for PJ O'Rourke to die so I can sell my copy of Parliment of Whores, signed first edition.
Something went south along the way. Sold my soul to a chain.
Leaving Prince Books, reminding the boss to tell Mr Smith when the books in the Alexander Kent series from McBooks were coming out. She said "how do you expect anyone to remember that?" and I told her "I could."
Four years now at the chainstore. Benefits. Direct deposit. Weekly paycheck. No longer going hungry for three days at the end of the two week period.
HP5. Now taking pre-orders HP6. Timothy McVeigh's autobio as a recommended Mothers Day present. Seeing Steinbeck on the Bestseller list again. Still hating Oprah.
Selling romance novels. I was in the business ten years before working at a bookstore that sold Romance in their own section, let alone Harlequin novels.
The Manga boom.
Seeing girls come up to the counter looking for Maybe He's Just Not Into You. "It's for a friend," they'd say.
Fourteen years of watching trends and tides come and go.
Annoying customers who can't remember the title, just that the cover's blue and the author was on Oprah last year.
Seeing kids who started out with the Babysitters club books stopping by on Christmas break from William & Mary.
I wouldn't give this up for anything.
Except maybe my own best seller.