After a
string of one-nighters, it feels like such a luxury to settle into a city for more than a day. My colleague Adena once remarked
that she enjoys being planted in one place for awhile because you get up and go
to work like everyone else.
It sounds
weird but I kind of love Monday mornings for that reason. It’s a miserable rainy
day, and I’m sharing that start of the work week grind, though I suspect I’m secretly
enjoying my job more than some of these folks on the subway do theirs.
The problem
is that there are fewer and fewer cities with enough critical bookstore mass to
warrant staying for more than a night or two, and my week in Toronto is by far
the longest duration I spend in any of the cities in my territory. Once, a book rep could easily spend a week in
Minneapolis, St Louis, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee. Now I can even do Chicago with a couple day
trips. Sad.
Today I hit
three good stores, so no complaints.
Well, maybe one.
At one college
store, I overheard a customer asking a bookseller to recommend a book. Obviously, not an unusual occurrence. But it was one of those frustrating,
open-ended requests: “I have to read a novel for a class and it can be
anything.” The student was unwilling or
unable to share anything much about her reading tastes. The bookseller seemed flummoxed, annoyed, unhelpful. At most of the indie bookstores I call on,
staff would be falling over themselves at an opportunity like this. Doesn’t every bookseller keep a quick mental
index of favorites for these situations?
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