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.

gaspard et lisa

I enjoy trying to figure out where the customers are from as they come downstairs. Some obviously don't speak right away but within entering the room they usually say a few words. Some of them address me directly, ruling out whether they are French or not right away. The Italians and the Spanish generally don't try to speak French much past Bonjour so they're pretty easy. Portuguese, too, except whether they're Brazilian or not is more difficult. Americans I spot a mile away but the other anglophones take a bit more time to pick out. Got to get them talking. Accents I love are Irish, Spanish and French speaking English. I also enjoy the Japanese because they're so different from any other people I've met. I love their way of interacting, bright, quick, quiet and polite.

Today I got to watch some nice Japanese tourists. First a mother and her two young daughters. Both girls had their hair in a bob cut, only different lengths and texture. The older daughter who looked about eight had fly-away puffs of hair while her little sister had silken hair with that baby sheen. The mother approached me with a nod and a palm raised in question and asked in percussive French about Gaspard et Lisa aux Grands Magasin. It's the one where they go to Galerie Lafayette, a fancy department store and a monument of Paris.

I frowned at first and said I wasn't sure, remembering another customer earlier this month who almost bought it. A stylish Spanish woman who braved the dusty top shelf to bring down the oversized book in question. I had forgotten all about it frankly. I had also forgotten whether or not the woman had bought it, which today I delightfully discovered she had not.

Offering this delightful book to the lovely little girl from Japan today, seeing her face light up when she held it in her hands reminded me of what I love about this job.

outside over there

A woman came into the store looking for a Maurice Sendak book that we haven't had in stock for years. She looked nearly seventy with fuzzy silver hair and riveting wrinkles around lucid, watery blue eyes. She wore a floral purple shirt that made me wistful for summer. She spoke softly but direct like a yoga teacher, her words slipping through her relaxed smile in a holiday tanned face. There was a silent friend of hers wearing white lurking off to the side somewhere.

The woman talked about a Vietnamese movie in which the book had been referenced. I thought about the weather in Vietnam this time of year. Buggy, green, lush and warm. Maybe she got that tan on a beach there. Or shopping at a market in Saigon where she first wore that floral shirt, still crisp from her suitcase. I had to keep blinking these thoughts away as I searched for her book.

I wrote down the reference information and sent her up to the special orders desk. On her way upstairs she turned and said in that Zen-French way, "Too bad you're in the basement on such a nice day". I flashed a painful smile and watched her go. Then I chatted with my colleague Elise about Maurice Sendak, showing her In the Night Kitchen and saying he was un peu particulier as a writer. That's what I say when I'm not sure how to explain an artist to someone in French. They always know what I mean. French is cool that way.

So I work in the basement of the bookstore. That means underground. I can hear the Metro rumble by in it's own underground lair somewhere nearby. Customers often confuse this sound with thunder, glancing worried expressions towards the cieling. I can hear the street traffic up above rushing by in front of the store, especially those high-pitched European sirene sounds and the occasional demonstration or strike. The revolutionary spirit is alive and well in France, though a bit more organized and less bloody than back in the Robespierre days. The latest to storm the Bastille were supporters of the ceasefire in Lebanon. In the basement the sounds were muffled but I still had the sensation I worked under a carnival that day.

Sometimes it's cozy down there, like when people come in looking wet and rumpled with their soggy umbrellas and frazzled eyes. Other times it's oppressive, like when a tan yogi French woman in a floral shirt makes a comment about what a shame it is to be downstairs on such a beautiful day. Oh yeah, and when I go into the stock room with the strange medieval air shaft where I hear the echo of voices. There's a sink just there with a mirror and a ghastly fluorescent light where I wash up after lunch. One day I heard the eery mumbles of mens' voices laughing and such through the stone and cement. I thought customers had suddenly rushed into the stock room. Toothpaste dribbling down my chin, I bent my head up and first noticed the shaft.

It leads to a place on the street above where some cluster of businessmen come for their cigarette breaks. Although I couldn't show you the exact spot above ground, and that's not from lacking of trying. None of my coworkers have been any help either, even the veterans to the place. The heavy odor of burnt tobacco hangs in the air of the basement stock room like a bar just after closing. I heard one time firemen had to be called when a cigarette butt found its way down there and smouldered away, filling the stockroom with smoke.

Dangerous stuff, fire, in our line of work. Good thing the culprits are mostly bankers and lawyers. They'll be able to read us the fine print on our insurance policy afterwards.

the bookseller

La libraire is bookseller in French. I chose the French word because I am working at a French bookstore (librairie) in Paris and because things in French usually sound prettier than in English. I was hired by la librairie to run their children's books department which carries lots of books in English.

Having always been bookish (livresque) and English speaking, the job seemed a natural fit. What I have come to discover is that although I know books (livres), I was unaware of all the different people who come to buy them. A book is a predictable thing, a front and back cover and pages with words telling a story from beginning to end. People however come in all kinds of packaging with the most unpredictable, astonishing stories of whom I encounter only the abbridged versions.

So this blog is dedicated to the people I sell books to - people who make my life as a libraire possible and sometimes impossible.