40,000 books

Archive: Online bookselling

In cataloging our 40 thousandth book we passed a milestone* of sorts. Sounds like a whole heaping lot doesn’t it? We started selling online in the fall of 1999. It really should be more. But lovers, illness, assorted humours keep you away from the keyboard or not in the mood to steadily type away.

We have about 16 thousand books for sale online. I’m not sure how many have sold in the shop and how many have been shipped elsewhere. At the very least 10 thousand have followed The Structure and Integuments of Parasitic Nematodes out of Durham.

Right before cataloging book 40,000 Gordon told me the shop had the worst March in many years. (I think he said since Reagan was president but I’ve meant to ask him if he meant the beady-eye one’s dad.)

Gordon’s news had left me in a dark funk. What would become of me without Books Do Furnish A Room? Twenty years of doing what you damn well please doesn’t leave you fit for being someone’s employee. I was doing that before I opened the shop. But older and with responsibilities I doubt if it’d be possible to work for someone on my own terms now. Whatever employment years of selling used books leaving you able to secure. I remember the chill I felt when I saw a customer of ours bagging groceries at Food Lion.

Maybe it was more of a light gray funk. I’m pretty good at not worrying about the damnations that may be waiting in futurity. Although it was a few years that I could approach the shop without wondering if it had burned down in the night.

Whether it was the triumph in Iraq, the moon or the collective cussedness of mankind orders started flowing in Monday.

*I guess I should bring a thesaurus home some day so I have a wider offering of clichés.