Book Puzzles

 I am reading three books at once--all three about bookstores.

In Praise of Good Bookstores by Jeff Deutsch, the director of Chicago's Seminary Co-op Bookstore. Published in 2022 by Princeton U press, which should know better than to give it such an unattractive cover. Hello, Marketing?

Sixpence House: Lost in a town of books (2003, Bloomsbury), by writer Paul Collins--about moving with his family to Hay-on-Wye, a town that has made bookselling its lifeline.

And my favorite, which I am gobbling up:
Confessions of a Bookseller, (2019)--a year in the life of the author, Shaun Bythell, the owner of a second-hand bookstore in Scotland.

I'm surprised by how much I'm liking Confessions because while his tales of bookselling held me, I didn't like Bythell himself in his first book, Diary of  Bookseller.
Has he become a better writer?
Maybe a bit.

Did someone point out that his one-way sour view of humans was a bit of a turn off?  (It was to me. I only read his second diary because the topic interests me.)
Maybe so.
Or, at least, he now includes himself in his assessments, writing, for instance, about how it was his limitations, his terror of commitment, that ended his relationship with the woman he loved. He goes light on the self-reflection, which is good, but it rights the score.
The focus is still on the day-to-day running of a bookstore--with plenty of attention given to the annoyances.

I share some of his annoyances--including the physical labor involved in book sorting. (He has a bad back from it.)
Here's my workspace on Saturday--at the end of the day, after I'd sorted and priced many boxes. (Toys and games on the left, mostly.)

Unlike Bythell, I rarely face annoying customers--that's our cashier's problem. The customers who talk to me are almost (almost) all appreciative.

Though there is the occasional sour puss.
One woman was always complaining to me--"you should put the puzzle pieces in bags/this book is in the wrong area"--until I suggested she volunteer and do it herself.

And she did!
She--Abby--is only the second person to take me up on a suggested solution.

Another woman complained to me about our price stickers--they don't come off easily, and sometimes, if you don't soak them off, they tear the paper. Same as Goodwill's stickers.
But most of our books have no stickers at all, because for ease, I set standard prices:
99 cents paperbacks, $1.99 hardbacks--OR AS MARKED.
Maybe a quarter of the books are individually priced. And a lot of those have shiny covers that don't tear when you pull the stickers off.

Anyway, I told this angry woman that I agreed with her, our system isn't ideal. But we don't buy our price stickers--we're a poor store, and I handwrite the price on whatever odds and ends of stickers are donated. (Right now, they're big round pink ones.)
We don't often get easily removable stickers, and anyway, like Goodwill, we want our stickers to stick so that people don't peal them off to get the cheaper price.
 
I told her all this and suggested that if she'd like to donate some peal-off stickers, I would be happy to use them. (Honestly, that would make me happy.)

Her response?
"I am never coming here again."

And so far as I can tell, she hasn't. Which was the other possible but unsaid solution that would make me happy.

I'm sorry, I say to people who complain, but this is a thrift store––and not a nationally coordinated one either. We don't have automated pricing equipment, we don't have inventory of our stock.
Do we have a cord for your particular food processor? Or a certain phone charger?
I don't know--we have a box of cords, you can look for yourself.
(I do tend to know if we have any particular book though.)

Anyway--volunteer Abby has come in once a week to sort and price games and puzzles for more than a year now.
She's still kind of sour, but she's a huge help.
(Come to think of it, she's of Scottish descent. Is that a Scots thing, sourness?)

Abby's special love is puzzles. (I don't like puzzles, and I don't care, and I don't have time to futz with them. I don't mind doing the other toys.)
Abby takes some home to do for fun, and to check if all the pieces are there. She marks the box if a piece or two is missing. People will buy puzzles with missing pieces, if they're not in crucial spots--say, not the lips of the Mona Lisa. 
She counts puzzles with just a few pieces, like the 26-piece floor ones for kids.
And she bags the pieces of all the puzzles, so they don't spill when customers open the boxes (which they tend to do vigorously, sending the contents across the floor, until Abby began bagging them).

Puzzles are her specialty, but she gives games a lot of care too. She bags little pieces, counts cards, and makes sure the instructions are there--and if they're not, she finds the instructions online and prints them up!

Because she does all this, she charges a bit more for the nice ones---like, $2.99 to 4.99. Given that new games and puzzles sell for around $25, and more, this is a great deal.

If I had to do games & puzzles, I'd glance inside their boxes and if they looked more or less okay, I'd slap a "99 cents, as is" sticker on them and call it a day.

And... now I'm off to work.
Have a good whatever-time-of-day it is where you are!