We’ve just had a Street Fair, or as we call it at the bookstore, “The Running of the Queues.”  All weekend, persons of a more delicate sensitivity, finding themselves averse to the boggy environs of the rented chemical toilets, stream into the bookstore in search of relief.  One always hopes to distract them coming in or out with a few tempting displays of new hardcovers, or remarkably inexpensive remainders, perhaps a rare used book or two.  Such is the pressing nature of their business that few can be bothered to pause long enough to read so much as a sign directing them to their goal.

Thus the frequency and predictability of their only question.  But still, mightn’t we hope, having endured the impossibly long line upstairs, with nothing but their own need to think on, that they might find a happy distraction after in the stacks of the new Dan Brown, if nowhere else?  But it is not to be.  Not when the Spring air outside is still redolent of kettle-corn and childhood, when there are still heavy, artisanal crafts of a beauty and density not seen since summer-camp to be examined, and buskers out there, eating fire to the tune of a patched accordion.  We can but wish them a good day at the Fair as they go.  (And perhaps a bit tidier, ladies especially, in their use of “the facilities,” as one dear old party called them.)

Makes one happy to get back to the more usual unpleasantness, the more varied eccentricities of actual customer service.  And so, a sequel of sorts; offering another selection of the more individual difficulties taken from the crazy, mixed up files of the day to day in bookstore quandaries.  (All entries welcome.  Please feel free to pass along any of your own for possible future illustration and inclusion in the unofficial record.)