Friends and Foes

“Go and write your blog … quickly”, orders the wife “and it would be good if you put the cat out for half an hour”. It’s Friday night and the cat and I dutifully go about our business.

It has been a strange week. Work is coming out of my ears, and yet none of it seems particularly rewarding, either financially or in terms of work-satisfaction. My online world is definitely attracting the “wrong sort of customer”; hawk-eyed students spotting that my site is undercharging for some required text that the publisher has just raised the price by 25%. Irritating phone calls from people demanding to know why the hard-to-source Springer-Verlag (New York Office only) title they ordered two days ago hasn’t been delivered by return of post. I am extremely likely to verbally “nut” one of them very soon.

Doing a Linux show at Olympia on Wednesday and Thursday was a time of mixed emotions, too. So many people coming up to the stand to ask “what happened to Sicilian Avenue?; “the shop in the City?”; even “where’s Darren, now?”. There were the usual crises (the non-operational printer which meant a nocturnal 80-mile round-trip to source another), the non-operational PDQ machine, the dire warnings that one hasn’t brought enough of this, that or the other. But it all worked pretty well, and it was great to have companionable contact with customers once again.

When I left publishing to become a bookseller I quickly realised that by running a specialist business I was likely to attract a fairly specialist sort of customer, and these people could point me at the right titles to stock with much more insight than publishers’ reps. By listening to their comments at the till, and by chasing up their asked-for books, you quickly establish a better business. You just don’t get that sense of human contact running a virtual bookstore. Gone are the Westlake’s and Blake’s; the Molyneux’s, Dr Elias and the teams from the local training companies. I miss them.

I also miss the staff. Just about every one of them, who span my thirteen-odd years of bookselling in London (and Brum). It’s good to see that they too regard those days as days to be recalled and have occasional reunions. I’m not sure if this is more in the spirit of school reunions or the type of gathering my Dad used to attend – of his fellow prisoners-of-war. Probably the latter!

There used to be a saying when I worked at Penguin that when people left the company (whether voluntarily or not) they always did better. I guess every rule has to have its exception.