“Oh, people come in and move stuff all the time.”
I was talking to a bookseller a while back. The topic got around to re-shelving – that thing people do when they go into bookshops and move their favourite books (or, rather less creditably, their own books) to visible positions in the front of the shop.
I’m never sure whether I’m a particularly rule-bound person or whether I’m just pathologically polite. The latter seems infinitely more likely; except when I’m totally shattered or very annoyed and stressed, I can generally work myself into a state of profound guilt over the possibility that I did not make sufficient polite eye-contact with the checkout guy when I buy a yoghurt. I was recently caught so completely flatfooted in New York by someone suggesting I’d been rude that I actually didn’t know what to say. Which does not happen often. I know now, of course. But now is rather too late.
Anyway, re-shelving bugs me because it seems to put other people to trouble and aggravation. So I asked this person how the dealt with it at her shop. Did she intervene when she saw it happening?
“No,” she said, “but there’s way more of us on staff than there are of any given individual who is re-shelving, so we just wait a few minutes and then put everything back exactly as it was. After a few rounds, they realise they’re not going to make it happen and they go away.”
(Note carefully that this exchange of high levels of passive aggression is very British, and possibly very London-British.)
Just recently one of my parents’ friends called me to tell me she had engaged in a massive re-shelving project on my behalf at her local bookshop, and the only thing I could think of to say was “please don’t”, which of course I couldn’t say at that moment because she already had, but which I have subsequently said very gently in the least passive-aggressive way I could find.
Aside from the fact that it just messes up the stock of a bookshop, thereby making it harder for booksellers and indeed customers to find books, it is incredibly unkind to those authors who are in the high-visibility shelves legitimately. They’ve been picked out by staff, won prizes, made the bestseller list, or maybe the position has been out-and-out purchased from the book’s budget. They have a narrow window to make use of that opportunity, and for some of them – especially the literary titles – every single sale is a huge win. Some books don’t really sell very many copies. Like they sell in the hundreds. Many sell in the low thousands and vanish forever. They get one shot at becoming this year’s breakout hit, and it isn’t really fair to them to come cover them up with my book. My book is a streetfighter. It can handle itself in a crowd. It has a really strong jacket, a powerful design, and its author is a bigmouth. I myself have a selection of strong jackets (people have even been unkind enough to say they are ‘loud’ or ‘nauseating’) and I like to get out there and mix it in person, in print and on the Internet. And, you know, if positions were reversed and Angelmaker were in a ‘staff picks’ bin taking its shot at fame and fortune and someone came along and dumped five copies of “The Life And Loves Of Pogo Yaxminster: A Biography of Britain’s Greatest Stamp Collector” between it and the customers, I would be pretty pissed. So I extend the same courtesy to Pogo Yaxminster, knowing that the truth is he’s unlikely to do a lot of trade outside the philately community unless the book is absolutely brilliant. In which case it does not deserve to be smothered in the crazed adventures of a man, a woman, and a vile dog.
And that is all I have to say about that.
