There is a saying among booksellers: it would be the best job in the world if it weren’t for the customers. Of course, this isn’t really true. Customers are what make the days memorable − those strange, intimate interactions remind me why I love books in the first place.
My favourite memories are of the sassy customers. These people are one-in-a-hundred but each interaction makes my day. We once had an old lesbian couple who came in and asked for a copy of Little Women for a young girl.
‘It’s great to have books like these,’ one of them gushed at the checkout. ‘Stories about strong women.’
‘No,’ her partner retorted, ‘it’s a story about one strong woman and three bitchy ones.’
But I am also ceaselessly bewildered by the customers who ask for extremely specific items, ones that probably don’t exist or aren’t at all related to books, and who then act surprised when we don't have them.
An oddly frequent one is, ‘Do you sell stamps?’
An extremely serious young man once asked, ‘Do you have a book on mushrooms? Not a cookbook, just the concept.’
And, from an elderly man on the phone, ‘Do you have Crime and Punishment? But in small segments, because it’s too big to carry on its own.’
Then there are the customers who only provide snippets of information about a book they’re searching for. These people say things like, ‘I think the main character is named John’ or ‘The author is Australian and I think it was published sometime in the last fifteen years’.
My favourite example of this was a young man who wandered into the bookshop like he’d never entered one in his life and enthusiastically flagged me down, calling out, ‘Hey! Do you work here?’ When I told him I did, he goes, ‘Oh, sick! I really want to buy this book.’
‘Okay,’ I replied. ‘Do you know the title?’
‘Um, wait, hang on.’ He held up his hand. ‘It’s on my phone.’
He scrolled through his phone for a few moments, before sighing hopelessly. ‘Oh man, I bet I’m not going to find it now.’
‘Can you tell me anything about it?’ I asked.
‘Yes!’ he cried confidently. ‘It’s blue! Does that help?’
When he eventually found the book, it was green − and he didn’t buy it.
Of course, I’ve also come across difficult clientele too: people who always think they’re right. Even though this is frustrating, I can’t help but admire their endless confidence. We once had a lady who sauntered into the bookshop and snapped to my manager, ‘Oh, you’ve moved things around, this bench used to be on the other side.’
‘Not at any point I’ve worked here,’ he replied, ‘which has been ten years.’
‘Oh no,’ she said dismissively, ‘much earlier than that.’
My manager and I just looked at each other. What do you say to that?
Then there are the lonely elderly people who I speak to on the phone who I can immediately identify by the slow, elongated way they speak.
‘Readings bookstore, this is Caitlin,’ I’ll say and will hear, muffled through static, a soft and oddly formal voice: ‘Hello-o-o, this is Ron Edwards from Altona, is this Re-e-eadings-s bo-o-ksto-o-ore?’
I’ll reassure them that it is and then they’ll usually ask for a book that has been out of print for decades and is unavailable. Then they just stay on the line and chat for several minutes, about how their garden’s going, or a new diet they plan to try, or their grandchildren. The book was never the reason they called; it didn’t take me long to realise this after speaking to a few on the phone every week. They’re just kind people, probably living alone, who still use a landline. In the days of online shopping, bookshops are one of the last places customers can call and hear a real voice, where they can speak to a person whose job actually encourages patience and connection.
There is another type of customer who reminds me that bookselling isn't just scanning items through a checkout, or not all the time, anyway. They hit me with these extremely personal questions about book recommendations that go well beyond what the best summer read is for their upcoming trip to Europe.
I had one of these customers just the other day. He came in looking very shy and sweet, a man of about sixty with a knitted sweater that had a big teddy bear on it. He approached the counter, took me to one side and asked if I could help him with something.
He wanted recommendations for a book on grief. ‘My wife has just died,’ he told me.
I clearly looked distressed because he immediately added, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to give you a shock.’
‘No,’ I told him. ‘No, it’s okay.’
In reality, having dealt with my share of grief too, my heart was in my mouth.
I showed him the personal development section, which seemed incredibly inadequate, and then went to an older colleague, who had more knowledge of this category. We showed him five or six books and he ended up buying them all.
As I scanned the books at the counter, he told us that he and his wife had been coming to our bookshop together for twenty-five years.
‘We just loved it here,’ he said. And then he wandered out, the pile of books under his arm.
I nearly burst into tears watching him go, hoping I’d helped him in some way. I couldn’t stop thinking about the ritual he and his wife had shared together, coming into the bookshop and making themselves at home for a while, maybe buying something, maybe not. I imagined them buying birthday presents, picking out gifts for their children, or bringing home books wrapped in brown paper to read side by side in the evenings.
For that man and his wife, as for so many others, bookshops are sanctuaries − one of the last ones left in this increasingly chaotic world. They’re slow, introspective places, where anyone can simply sit on couches thumbing through books all day. They’re places where everyone is welcome, where everyone is safe, where everyone can make themselves at home, even if just for a little while.
Caitlin Cassidy is a freelance writer and Masters student in Global Media at the University of Melbourne. She works at Readings.