Some top-notch books have come into the shop this past week. We are barely keeping up with our cataloguing. Add the 50+ boxes of unprocessed stock piled precariously against our new office wall and we’d say that the bounties of spring are upon us here at Brown and Dickson. You know what that means: boss books offered to you.
We also completed an inventory of our stock and updated the website. When Jason worked at Blockbuster this was an easy, if boring, task. You’d take a barcode scanner and walk from tape to tape, bleeping your way to completion (that’s what she said).
At Brown and Dickson it is a whole other beast. We have 3000 individual products. It’s a long, if fascinating, process of, “Hey, we completely forgot we had that!” or, “That’s where that bloody book is!” See, well-meaning customers often help us by reshelving things. More often than not, it’s the “this belongs here instead of there” method of “help.”
It’s a conversation we sometimes have with our more professional librarian colleagues. When they are in the shop they’ll ask why this book is shelved here and not there. “It’s not this way in the Library of Congress.” We loosen them with scotch and explain that books are shelved in bookstores depending on where a customer will most likely find them, not by an elaborate, yet helpful, call number system of deep, granular meaning.
This is why a book about Amelia Earhart might be in Women’s Studies, not Travel or History. We know the Library of Congress would not put it there, but as we booksellers are the pirates of the literary market, we can put things wherever we please. Blame the shifting sands of capitalism or the peculiar assault of our personalities on brains, but they go where they go.
This means inventory week is a slog. A book about a British Egyptologist who dabbled in the occult could very well be anywhere. Did he grow beautiful gardens? Gardening then. Did he build his own plane? Transportation perhaps. Those British DO like to go where they please. We’d rather look for him during inventory week than in the depths of our stock later on after you place an order. Best be safe with British Egyptology occultists, there’s a lot of cursing potential there.
Best be safe, always.
Having said that, there isn’t a single program that we’ve tried which successfully catalogues used books at scale (with any reliable accuracy). Ours is a home-brew Chitty Chitty Bang Bang thing that does what it needs to most of the time. This still means Jason is wandering around the shop for seven days seeking out that ONE book so he can check it off a list. There are worse fates. And the dopamine rush at the end? Flawless.
Please enjoy the New Arrivals friends.
Much love,
Jason and Vanessa
