10.14.07 book haul

Yesterday, i hit a couple of bookstores in the French Quarter. It wasn't a deep trawl, just a hit and run. Someone must have dumped all of his Ismail Kadare, as i found three (one of which i already had, two of which i've already ready.) Only Doruntine was a "new" book.

The other notable find was Alexander Theroux's Darconville's Cat. Bill has been urging me to read it for a couple of years now. Accidentally, i wound up with some kind of a fake first edition. According to Bill, the real first edition has a single page that is filled with a dot matrix checkerboard, but the smaller run has a single black page. The one bought yesterday has the single black page.

serating in bookstores

Yes, there definitely needs to be more seating in bookstores. I've worked in bookstores for over seven years. Decreasing the seating only encourages the regulars to hog the remaining seats. Seating was so sparse in the last bookstore that i worked in that we had several complaints a day about how there was nowhere to sit. We couldn't boot any of the regulars because it would have meant calling bullshit on the ones who were just using the bookstore as their personal clubhouse. the bastards even began forming alliances with each others on squatters' rights, to hold the chairs for the other ones while one of them left the store, or take chairs in shifts, which would have made more sense if these were homeless people. (They were not.) I loathed many of our regulars obviously. Once i had a complaint from one of them that someone had removed a bookmark he was using a book in a certain place that he had been hiding it.

These people are an inescapable burden though. Decreasing seating is not going to deter them, only the real customers, the ones who will resort to purchasing books online... like myself. I cannot even go into my old bookstore because all of the seats are taken by the same people day after day.