Hell Is Other Customers

I understand Taylor’s misgivings about bookstores being turned into
playpens for the lonely, the trendy and the socially inept, and I’ve
seen every sin of self-absorption he’s described and decried.

My particular beef is those who treat the bookstore as if it were a
library, a place to either sit and read from the shelf in stages,
dog-earing and chafing the item beyond saleability (pages bent down,
spines cracked, covers creased and curled), and or those researching
whatever complex and vaguely outlined project they’ve set for
themselves.

This second example is especially loathsome, since these folks,
students with no money more often than not, appear with their
backpacks and spend some time in three or four sections, taking books
here and there, and then settle in someplace, usually an aisle,
sitting on the floor, books open and turned upside down, with the
ersatz scholars copying whole paragraphs from texts they have no
intention of buying.

I have found more than one person copying pages with their cell phone
cameras, an interesting method of shop lifting. (Anyone seen someone doing this at a bookstore??) We’ve since banned
cell phone use in our store. There is nothing more exasperating than
the wounded-animal look these peculiar sorts give you when we remind
them (really!) that they’re in a bookstore, not a library. One girl
who’d been feverishly copying passages from an expensive philosophy
book from a pricey university publisher actually asked me this:

“You mean you don’t want me to take notes?”
“No. These books are for sale…”

“For sale?”
“Yes.”

“Just let me finish this one thing I started to write….” Her voice
took on the squeaking whine of noisy plumbing.

“This isn’t a negotiation. Put your pen away. Do you want to buy this book?”

“Do you have it used?”
“No”.

She was sitting in a graceless lotus position on the floor, holding
the book open on her lap
so that the binding continued to crack. I leaned over and took the
book from her, closing it and smoothing the front and back covers with
my hands. I only wish I had a snapshot of the clueless,
uncomprehending expression she had on her face as her mouth gaped open
and her eyes quite literally filmed over as if trying to grasp
something as abstract as the idea that we were a store and needed to
sell books. Sell books, not rent them, exchange them, lend them out,
let you read them to a grimy pulp, photocopy them, borrow them or any
other form of exchange that falls outside the boundary of a simple
cash or credit card transaction.

Less attractive are the world travelers who have the money to take
vacations in far flung corners and exotic niches of the globe, yet who
are so miserly in their preparation that they won’t purchase travel
guides but will instead spend up to an hour in your store copying
airline and hotel information from a current book onto index cards.
There is an industry term for this sort of clientele. Here it is in
the form of an inside joke. A cranky bookseller goes up to a young
wannabe hipster who’d been lingering long and uselessly in the poetry
section and say to him