4.15.19
Due to wonky coffee shop Wi-Fi, the previous edition of this newsletter was sent out with major chunks missing. Sorry for the confusion.
The McLott reading was due to be Wordsmith & Sons’ largest of the year, and Anne had been sending increasingly frantic emails to the coordinator of the event venue — a 1,200-person capacity auditorium on the college campus that abutted the bookstore.
The reading was for A Titan On The Hill, a much-buzzed-about biography written by the son of former New Jersey Senator William McLott, who had passed away after suffering a stroke on the Senate floor. The event had sold out within hours of going on sale on the W&S website.
“How did this guy write a book within six months of his father dying?” Julie, the store’s HR manager-slash-accountant-slash-graphic designer, had asked Anne in their shared office.
“With some help from a few well-paid friends, I imagine,” Anne said, and went downstairs to refill her work mug.
*
Anne had worked at W&S since graduating from Rutgers five years ago. It sounded corny, but she really did love her job. She had realized this after the first time she hand-sold a novella from an obscure publisher to a student who had come in looking for a poli sci coursebook. She had even grown to relish the pissy phone calls and in-store meltdowns from the pensioners whose days revolved around visiting the store.
Anne had her first experience with one of the store’s regulars, Mrs. D’Agostino, early on in her tenure as a bookseller. The woman was tall and lanky and reminded Anne vaguely of Bea Arthur. She had lumbered up to Anne at her info desk perch sporting a thick ring of coral lipstick and a fur, despite the fact that it was June.
“Can anybody here tell me where my copy of the new Clark Antonio is?” she asked.
“Let me check on that for you, Mrs. D’Agostino,” Anne said. One of the other booksellers, Dan, had warned Anne about a few of the store regulars, and had made a point of ID-ing them to her during her first week, for which Anne was grateful. She opened the store’s inventory program, clicked through to incoming shipments, and trailed her finger down the column of book names. “It looks like we haven’t received that title from the publisher quite yet. I’m sorry about that.”
Mrs. D’Agostino clicked her tongue. “Paula assured me it would be here today,” she said, in a tone that made it sound like her world view had been unceremoniously turned upside down by some malicious force. “I can’t help wondering why I keep coming back here after the treatment I’ve received over the years.”
Paula was the bookstore’s owner. Anne wasn’t super clear on the lineage of the bookstore, but knew that Paula and her partner, Shel, had bought W&S in the early 1970s, after the store’s previous owner had somehow been implicated in a conspiracy involving the Weather Underground.
Thanks for reading. More of this story — or maybe something completely different! — next week.
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