Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Book requests

Some customers have trouble remembering the right name of the book they want. Care of Emily at Riverbend. Thanks Emily.

My favourite book request was from campus bookselling - the customer would turn up and say, you know, it's a computer book and it's red.

Every single computer book we had was red, because that was the colour of the publisher's computer book bindings. All of them. Hundreds of the damn things, all exactly the same - bright red, white stripe and white title.

You'd be amazed how many students would just grab the nearest one and buy it, against all advice, begging and screeching as they walked out of the shop. An alarming amount of them never never did come back again. I guess those students didn't get jobs at microsoft.

3 comments:

Ampersand Duck said...

That was an excellent link. The comments thread is worth returning to :)

Shayne Parkinson said...

That was fun, especially the comments!

A while ago I asked in a DVD shop if they had "Twelfth Night". The young lad behind the counter said,"Is that the one with Richard Gere in it?" I assured him it wasn't. It was some time later before I realised he must have meant "First Knight".

I did get "Twelfth Night" eventually. Somewhere else.

Penthe said...

First, second, third and fourth night anyone?

I can't talk, once in an absent minded moment I put Primo Levi's Period Table in the Chemistry section. That was 19 years ago and this is the first time I've owned up to it. I feigned horror and amazement at the time. Shame on me.