Life in a Small-Town Bookstore

How sad!  The invisible hand of the marketplace has written, and it did not bode well for Hopper: my beloved Thanksgiving weekend Pennsylvania used book store ... is out of business.

Fortunately, there is another one a few miles away.  It’s not as good because, er, it’s better.  Better meaning it carries higher-end used books, used books that serious collectors might want.  Used books in cellophane packages.

But there are two shelves of new “junky”-condition paperbacks.  I’ve hard-to-find and out-of-print stuff from those shelves before.  Bought the recently-read The Hawkline Monster there last year.  So I stalked those shelves for forty-five minutes while the rest of the gang drove away to take care of some more errands.

I did have Little One with me.  We found an old but well-constructed book on gems and minerals for my budding amateur gemologist.  Me, I had a harder time.  Finally I settled on Fred Pohl’s The Day the Martians Came and Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ.  Pohl because, well, he died a few months ago and I made a decision to read some of his stuff in 2014 – and his stuff is strangely hard to come by.  Strobel because, well, I had read about his book and had heard him in interviews and decided a good pro-Christian book in our increasingly anti-Christian culture would be a positive thing to experience.

My daughter and I, browsing the shelves, had the weird fortune to witness an odd interaction during those forty-five minutes.  A somewhat grizzled man came in and stalked about the back of the store, where the owner had some expensive antique-y things.  Finally, he seemed interested in what appeared to be some old model railroad fencing and stuff.  Not sure, because I’m not into model railroads, though I had a childhood friend whose father built a whole model railroad city on a pool table in their basement. 

Anyway, after much banter with the owner’s assistant, the grizzled man sighed.  “I’m really interested in this,” he said, “but $110.00 is a little too much.”

The assistant paused.  I don’t know how the scene was playing out, visually; my back was turned while I was scanning some philosophy and religion titles.  But after thirty seconds I heard the assistant ask, “What would be your offer?”

“Seventy-five.”

Immediately the store’s owner, a sixtiesh gray-haired hippy type who has sported Obama 2012 buttons on her sweatshirt in the past, cackled out from another corner of the store, “Forget it!”

The atmosphere immediately got a little oogy.  I looked over to Little One; she looked over to me. 

The grizzled man said, “Well, you could have just said ‘No.’  You didn’t have to say, ‘Forget it.’”  Another moment passed and the man spat out a sickly laugh; I wondered if they all knew each other and were now going to start making jokes or something.  But then grizzly adams cried out:  “But now I will forget it!” and stormed out, the front door bells jangling angrily.

Ah, these small-town back-woods bookstores.  The drama!  The drama!