13 modern english and american short stories

The book that never was. The book that remains a mystery since the customer leaves before the bookseller can conduct a complete and thorough investigation. Bookseller's would make great detectives if they didn't prefer books to people.

The woman came in with a rapid-fire list of books her mother ordered. She probably worked in the neighborhood and before the commute home she swept in hoping to do a quick errand for her mother in the suburbs. She appeared clutching a list, her mousey brown hair framing her face in wind-blown strands, tired eyes peering out of worn-out make-up. Wearning a wrinkled khaki raincoat with a belt that flapped out to one side haphazardly, she looked like the grey, rainy day that it was.

Two of the books on the crinkled paper she handed me shakily had been waiting patiently for mom all week. The third book, however, is where the mystery of this story lies. An awful long title for a book in bilingual fiction sought by students of English as a foreign language.

Th first factor making this a hard case: not my department, and my colleague whose department it was had disappeared upstairs unawares. This is the worst kind of colleague disappearance since you have no earthly way of knowing when they'll be back. Suddenly the immense size of the bookstore oppressed me. She could be anywhere, like the book...maybe she has the book??

Meanwhile the customer is having a somewhat hostile cell phone conversation with her mother. Mom's not much help. Confusion and discouragement are imminent.

The second factor working against the case: the computer says we have 2 copies of this god-awful long title but they are nowhere to be found on the shelf. Still no sign of my colleague and the customer gave up and left.

I, however, continued to search until my shift ended.

The case is not closed. My colleague did eventually turn up though. There's one mystery solved.

la rentree

Here in France there exists a social phenomenon called la rentrée every year after summer holidays. Bear in mind that most people vacation five weeks out of the year and most often in the month of August. Paris becomes a ghost town to Parisians and a monument theme park to tourists.

As the sun sets on summer and September begins, la rentree is all there is to talk about, read about, hear about or think about. There's la rentree scolaire with children going back to school, la rentree politique when politicians finally come back to work. There's la rentree litteraire, concerning yours truly, where orders come pouring in and bookstore shelves are once more packed to the bursting point with the latest and greatest. 683 new books have come out this year in France alone. Since we're an American-French bookstore, we order from US and UK publishers as well, making la rentree litteraire a formidable beast.

Lots of frazzled parents and their children looking for serious school books with long titles involving codes and ancronymes - no small feat for the foreigner. When a customer starts in on the codes, it's like they are suddenly speaking in alien tongues. This is especially true over the phone when I don't have the advantage of a crumply list dug out of an overcharged purse with chicken scratch in pencil and a coffee stain.

Aside from the scholastic books on the list it is also time to order the French literature for kids. Les Lettres de Mon Moulin by Alphonse Daudet. I am slowly but surely learning my way around the French children's literature. Having not spent my childhood in France it has been a challenge at times to convey confidence in my bookselling where French literature is concerned. I read French books in college but somehow I doubt Rhinoceros or Waiting for Godot will be of much service to me in the kids lit dept.

diary of a worm

A thirty-forty-something French woman was looking for the latest work by Doreen Cronin, author of the children's book Diary of a Worm. She's also written Diary of a Spider, which the woman couldn't stop raving about. In an attempt to quell her excitement, I looked up the author online and found out that her next book, Diary of a Fly, won't be out until Fall 2007.

The woman said in a polite but insistent French, "Oh, you really should have them all! She's just fabulous!" To which I replied in my most believable, customer service French, "Yes, you're absolutely right. I'm sorry we don't have them all. But if you'd like to order it . . . " But they rarely do in these cases. They simply want you to know how wonderful this book is, or how talented this author is, how much their work means to them, how important a contribution it is to children's literature, blah dee blah blah blah.

So sometimes my work as a bookseller is more that of a book counselor. People come in looking for that book they read as a child which we frankly haven't carried since then because times have changed and so must the contents of bookshelves. But I understand the attachment one forms to a book, so I nod my head sympathetically and apologize whole-heartedly and say "You're right" whenever they say we should carry this book, that it's a shame we don't. I wish I could find a magic spell or a genie for hire to conjure up these beloved missing books with a snap and a puff of smoke.

Meanwhile I must hold back the urge to explain to them that we cannot carry every book and that over the last few decades bookstores have become slaves to the media, following the wave of the latest craze, the bestsellers that fly off our shelves, the books that change their covers to suit the movie that follows, the short-winded tendancies for this classic or that depending on what Oprah Winfrey's reading on TV.

Some people will venture upstairs and inquire about ordering their beloved book, others shrug their shoulders and slump out disheartened, perhaps suddenly conscious of their place in the time-line continuum of books. Still others linger, chatting with me about that book they can't find anywhere anymore (except Amazon of course, but with those shipping charges and delays . . .) and I try to prop them back up before they leave empty-handed. The worst is when they learn the book is out of print, they look physically hurt, confused, as if they have just found out a dear friend has died. I am thus the bearer of bad tidings, a literary reality check, if you will.