Becoming a Book (+ Camels, and Whipped Cream)

I. "When I was little, my ambition was to grow up to be a book." --Amos Oz

I haven't started Infinite Jest yet because I'm caught up in Amos Oz's autobiography, A Tale of Love and Darkness (2003).

I happened to pick the book up in a Little Free Library the other day (because I don't see enough books at work?), not realizing Oz just died at the end of December, 2018.

You've maybe seen the debates about Marie Kondo, queen of decluttering, advising people to get rid of their book clutter?

I figure if you feel your books are clutter, you might benefit from clearing them out. (I did at one time, and it was liberating, but now I love having lots of books around).
On the store's FB, yesterday I invited people who are KonMariing their books to donate them to us:

[link to the Guardian article] 

With that in the back of my mind, last night I dog-eared the page where Oz writes about growing up, a Jewish boy born in 1939 in Jerusalem, with books.

Here's the first paragraph of that section (p. 23 of the Harcourt paperback):

"The one thing we had plenty of was books. They were everywhere: from wall to laden wall, in the passage and the kitchen and the entrance and on every windowsill. Thousands of books, in every corner of the apartment.
I had the feeling that people might come and go, be born and die, but books went on for ever.

When I was little, my ambition was to grow up to be a book. Not a writer. People can be killed like ants. Writers are not hard to kill either.
But not books: however systematically you try to destroy them, there is always a chance that a copy will survive and continue to enjoy a shelf life in some corner of an out-of-the-way library somewhere, in Reykjavik, Vallodolid, or Vancouver." 

Ib. . . . According to Peanuts:

(And the library lends e-book and audio books too!)


II. Time + Effort

Speaking of books, ta-da! 
A couple days ago, I posted the new, uniform book prices in the thrift store.  >

I let the cashiers know, and then I started putting out books with NO PRICE STICKERS!

It was immediately evident how much time this saves.
A lot.

I still have to clean cobwebs and kitty litter off some of the donated books (and throw out the fuzzy ones, and recycle the bestsellers from the '80s), but others I can just grab and shelve. 

After fifty-some years with books, I can judge them by their covers, quite often.  That's something Big Boss doesn't seem to get, when he pushes for me to train my coworkers to help--that it takes a long time to learn books, and if you don't love them, it'd be tedious work.

Overseeing uninterested workers is pointless, if the goal is both to create a good book store and to save time and effort.

II. Camel Management

Big Boss is always saying to me, "God will provide."

And I'm always replying, "OK, but as the prophet Mohammed said,
Trust in God, but tie up your camel."

[DIGRESSION: I do love Ishtar! I'm with Richard Brody, who wrote, in the article "Elaine May Talks About Ishtar" --New Yorker, 2016, "There’s a level of invention, a depth of reflection, and a tangle of emotions in “Ishtar” which are reached by few films and few filmmakers."]

So, yesterday I was a little annoyed with this character, God, because it felt like God took Big Boss's side:
I walked in the store, and a young woman came up to me and said, "I'm here to volunteer with you."

I could quickly tell she––I'll call her Akiko––was an answer to Big Boss's prayers, which I'm guessing go something like, 
"Please God, please send someone good to help our book lady, so we stop butting heads."

But, on the other hand, I had tied up my camel.
I asked Akiko how she thought to volunteer. 
She looked a little puzzled and said, "You asked me!"

Ha! Right. 
I remembered then that I'd seen and chatted with her and her boyfriend in the books section a couple times. I'm always telling customers who express interest in the store that they can volunteer. "You get 25% off!"
But, as I told Akiko, no one has yet taken me up on that.

III. The Cat That Got the Cream

Fingers crossed, Akiko really does seem like a wish come true. 
Like me, she has a touch of obsession––she even used that word––about putting media in order. (Once I found myself alphabetizing the Criterion collection of videos in a video store.) 

And, unlike me, she is a music person. She seemed attracted to the mess of our records shelves--a real no-man's land where my coworkers dump LPs and run away.
As media, the records are under my purview, but I never do a thing with them. Neither did my predecessor, nor anyone else.  

I know record collectors, however, have culled anything valuable from our shelves, because I've talked to a couple of them––one when he was standing in the check-out line with a single record--a pristine copy of the Rolling Stone's Sticky Fingers, the one with the Andy Warhol cover with a working crotch zipper.

"Is that a good find?" I asked, figuring it was. 

For 25¢, he said, it was, indeed, a good find.

After I'd taken some time getting to know Akiko, I asked where she'd like to start, and she chose the record shelves.
In a couple hours, she had piles of covers with no LPs inside; LPs with no covers; horribly scratched LPs (a lot); and the rest she had re-shelved by type:
Xmas music, musicals, folk, etc. 

Even I could tell they were mostly the equivalent of the bestselling paperback books I recycle. Olivia Newton John, The Sound of Music, recordings of Jr. High School bands... Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass got practically a whole milk-crate of its own. But no "Whipped Cream", alas. 

Have you noticed the Kirk photoshop bink did in 2009 (ten years ago!), at my request, on my sidebar here? [Not sure if it shows up on all devices.]

The contrast between Akiko's work and the work of coworkers who don't want to be working with books and media (the few times I've asked them for help) was HUGE. It pays off to work on things you love, and with people who love them too, if you can.

I asked Akiko how the shift had gone for her. 

"I'm hooked," she said.

_______________________________

tl;dr: I love books.