Shopping in a Bookstore: Lesson #1

I understand there are a lot of perfectly nice folks out there who like visiting and shopping in bookstores but wonder to themselves, "Am I doing this right? What IS the proper way to shop in a bookstore?"

Good news: I have all the answers to all the questions people didn't even know they were asking.

Bad news: Some of these lessons will be difficult to learn. But I'm confident that with time and effort, anyone can become an efficient and effective book shopper loved by bookstore employees everywhere!

Let's start with a big one. My number one cardinal rule of book browsing.

Do. Not. Put. The. Books. Back. Incorrectly.

This is basically the worst thing you can do. Okay, so maybe shoving 10 DVDs in your coat and making a break for the door is worse. And I suppose if you dumped your coffee all over an entire stack of books that would also be worse. But by far the most common offender is the person who puts the book back in the wrong place. Let me explain why this drives us booksellers CRA-zy.

If you come in looking for a book, I am going to look it up in the computer, see what it says we have and where, and then we'll go look for it together. Let's pretend that the computer says yes, we have one copy of Secrets of the Ultimate Husband Hunter (this is an actual title someone asked me for) by Nancy Nichols. Then we're going to head over to Self-Improvement (a treasure trove of ridiculously titled tomes) and make a beeline for the "N"s.


Now this may come as a surprise to some, but in the bookstore, we use something called "alphabetizing" to keep the books in order. What is alphabetizing? Well, it's just a handy little system in which the books are lined up according to the author's last name. So you and I are walking over to the shelf with the "N" authors, headed to get you some help with that wild sport of Husband Hunting, but upon arrival, we find no Nichols between Neighbors and Nim. Little do you know, and little do I know, that last week somebody else picked up that book, carried it around a bit, and then slid it back onto a shelf... in Fantasy. Which is perhaps a good place for a person who looks at the act of entering a relationship as "husband hunting" but that is an argument for another time and place. What matters is, that until someone is organizing the fantasy shelves and realizes that the Ultimate Husband Hunter is in the wrong place, nobody is finding and nobody is buying that book. So now the person who randomly tossed the book back on a shelve has made it so you can't get your book and we can't make a sale. You are frustrated at me for saying it looked like we had a copy (which it did) and I am frustrated because I can't find something our system says we should have (which we do).

What about people who put it back in the general area they found it? If Nancy Nichols, for example, gets put on the shelve right above or below, chances are that in looking in the "N" section we'll probably run across it. Plus we know that happens so we're in the habit of looking in the area before we call it quits. This is the least offensive, but still annoying, way that people put things back wrong.

Bumping it up several notches on the no-no scale is setting the wrong book in front of a face-out. I can hear you protesting: "What kind of crazy bookseller lingo are you using now, Amy?!" It's like this. Despite the old adage "not to judge a book by its cover," we all do it. Covers of books are prettier than spines, and people like looking at them. A "face-out" is when we take all the copies of a certain book on a shelf, and face them cover-out. This is nice to look at, helps us keep large quantities of certain books without taking up as much space, and fills out the full shelf. Example:



So now let's say there isn't one but four copies of Ultimate Husband Hunter and they are faced-out where they are supposed to be on the shelve but someone set another book down, faced out, right in front of them. If it is a random, not even remotely in the section book, we usually figure that one out pretty quickly. But let's say it is another self-help book, or even worse, another "N" author self-help book. You can see how we might easily be fooled by this face-out fake-out. And you can imagine how infuriating it is to realize later that the book you were looking for was right there the whole time.

But you want to be helpful! But you want to do the right thing! Here's the truth. I would rather put your book away for you than not be able to find it because you, even with the best of intentions, put it away wrong. So unless you really and truly know where your book goes, just bring it to someone who works there. Leave it on the info desk. Bring it up to the register and say you don't want it.

One exception to the don't-put-it-back-yourself rule: If you get a large stack of books from the same very small, very specialized section, put them back yourself. I'm serious. Do not pull out fifteen books on birdwatching and then leave them in a pile by the chairs in religion. You probably picked up every birdwatching book we have and you totally know where they go. Put them back or at least have the courtesy to bring them to the info desk and look apologetic about it. Did you pull out six books on Oracle SQL Programming? If you're smart enough to know what the heck that is, you're smart enough to put those books back where you found them. Leaving giant stacks of books by, in, and near the browsing chairs is super annoying. But we're veering into lesson two, to be continued at another time.

I hope you've enjoyed lesson one of shopping in a bookstore! Stay tuned for upcoming lessons, including:

• how to ask for help
• why we can't find "that one book about that guy" without more information
• my children's section is not a drop-off zone,
• why are books so expensive,
• why you can't return without a receipt
• stealing is a no-no,
• and so much more!