On Reading and Shopping

I hadn’t been in a mall bookstore for years, until yesterday.  I’d been in an airport bookstore, which is pretty much the same thing, only bigger, and without the employees who wear matching polo shirts, ala Foot Locker.  The atmosphere was just as I remembered, the last time I stopped in one to browse the Sweet Valley High selection while my mom exchanged some earrings at J.C. Penney — no reading couches; plently of flair.  Lots of two-for-one calorie counting guides, and more varieties of decorative bookmarks for sale then there were actual books in the store. 

I half-expected someone to walk up and offer me a basket of onion rings, half-price. 

But as I passed by Little Mall Bookstore, I was intrigued.  A sign near a small shelf near the front read “local interest.”  Vanity got the best of me, and I casually sprinted inside to see if Trespassers had made the cut.  It hadn’t.  In fact, it wasn’t anywhere in the store. 

While I quietly fumed over fifty or so Adolf Rupp biographies, a calendar of horse farms, and some figurines (these are the items “local”s are “interest”ed in “reading,” I suppose), my sister casually asked the clerk if they had Trespassers Will Be Baptized.  In between pops of gum, she smacked that she’d never heard of it; maybe it would come in next week.  Then she went back to restocking Tiger Beat.*        

I couldn’t help but think of an exchange from an ancient episode of Designing Women (one of the greatest brilliant-but-cancelled comedies of all time).  It happened between the character Julia and another teenage mall bookstore clerk, and it went something like this (I’m paraphrasing): 

Julia:  Pardon me, do you have Tess of the D’urbervilles?

Clerk:  [blank stare]

Julia:  Do you have any books?

Clerk:  This is a book store –

Julia:  I mean literature.

Clerk: [blank stare]

Julia:  Anything written by anyone who hasn’t appeared on Donahue. 

Now, I’m not saying that I’m as literary as Thomas Hardy (or even the Hardy Boyz, which you can read about in the layers of WWE magazines that make up approximately 1/3rd of Little Mall Bookstore’s total inventory), or that Little Mall Bookstore was obligated to put me front-and-center.  

In fact, I identify with them.  We’re both little and struggling; me to get noticed as a writer, them to get noticed, period.  Judging by the reduction in size and selection over the years, I suppose your average mall-goer is less and less interested in picking up some mental enrichment along with her CinnaBon.  Soon Little Mall Bookstore will be relegated to one of those sad little carts next to the food court, where they sell fake purses and New Age crystals and necklaces with your name on them.  Then they’ll be in vending machines, then little electronic kiosks next to the ATMs.      

I’d like to help them.  I really would.  I’d like to get a part-time job there, where I’d put in some couches and start story hours and author discussions. 

But they probably wouldn’t hire me.  I don’t have enough pieces of flair. 

*Ok, I made that up.  I don’t know what she was restocking, but I don’t think it was The Economist.

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