My local second-hand bookshop is in a constant state of flux. Staffed by unpaid volunteers, being a charity driven operation as it is, you’ll generally find a student, arty looking artist or bleeding heart charity-worker behind the desk on any given weekday. This would be fine if all they did was sit at the till and accept money, but most of them take it upon themselves to completely reorganise the fiction section according to their personal taste and opinion on a daily basis. This goes on and on. It’s incredible how much time is spent on it.
Firstly, most regularly, the chick-lit and science fiction are separated out to the left, “real” authors go in the middle and mystery and crime novels go down the right hand bookshelf. A few days later I find that someone has evidently decided that apportioning categories to these writers is too difficult or ambiguous. The old arrangement is done away with, and all novels are put into alphabetical order regardless of subject matter or genre. The next week, for unknown reasons, sci-fi has been excised but the chick-lit has retained its position alongside Phillip Roth and Joseph Heller. It has also been decided that Norman Mailer does not belong in the Classics section and his books are summarily dumped in with the regular authors. His eviction is unlikely to last the week. Iain Banks flits between sections like an elusive spirit, impossible to pin down.
All this would be irritating if it wasn’t so fascinating to watch. I wonder if the alternating shopkeepers ever even meet each other. Do they groan when they walk in on a Tuesday morning to find their definitive structure undermined yet again? Eventually the whole process runs its cycle and seems to start over.
The pricing system is also susceptible to reassessments. They have a small old books section containing late nineteenth century/early twentieth century books for unguessable prices. In one collection of stories, the €6 pencilled in the top corner of the first page has been hastily scribbled out and replaced with 35 euro. The print date is underlined and “First Edition!!!” is scrawled below the price-tag. My window of opportunity is before that second appraisal.
Packing my purchase into a bag last week, the middle-aged Spanish woman starts as if she’s just remembered something. “Do you write poetry?” she asks. I laugh and then kick myself for laughing. When I tell her I don’t, she grins nervously and gestures to a pile of leaflets for a poetry competition. I kind of regret not taking one. I mean, I’ve never tried, but how hard could it be?
Mostly I’m just concerned that I look like the kind of person who writes poetry.