The Bookshop Blogger #16

Thursday, 27 May 2010 12:27 PM

Do you remember the 28th of August 1994? Probably not, but to those of us who have been in retail for more years than we care to remember it was the day that the laws on Sunday trading were relaxed – but not abandoned.

I mention this fact for two reasons: first of all, and please don’t think that I am going to use this forum to forever rail against Sunday papers, but the last time I worked on a Sunday, an incredibly impatient man, when told that he couldn’t make a purchase before twelve - a copy of the Sunday Telegraph by the way - slammed two pound coins on the desk and proceeded to walk out. The rudeness.

The second reason is that now shops are open seven days a week and till late into the evening we are forced to do stock checks over night.

I don’t mind this. In fact, I quite like it! The shop becomes like a Twilight Zone, a place where anything could happen. Alright, maybe not anything, but something.

So we had our stock check last week and I decided to volunteer. Some of it is boring and repetitive, but as it gets dark outside and the clock ticks away the magical witching hour approaches and - ta-da! - you find books that you had totally forgotten existed. I love that!

This year there was a bumper hoard of three books that had become lodged behind shelves or stuck under tables, two of which had not seen since, well, this time last year probably. There was a copy of Emma Kennedy’s How To Bring Up Your Parents which I could have recommended to my daughter last time! Then there was a Prom Guide from 2009, less useful. But the third book really was a bit of unearthed treasure.

I love good fiction and something new, I mean genuinely new, can get me as excited as a really good Victoria Sponge. I remember having that feeling in 1994 when a colleague, an exchange student from Wisconsin, introduced me to Douglas Coupland’s Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. There was something about the design of the book and the prose style that hooked me instantly and he became my new favourite writer. And so I ordered in five copies of the Abacus edition that came out in 1992, the version that my colleague had leant to me. It was square and the cover was dominated by a big X and covered in dystopian cartoon images. I remember making a feature of it and they sold like hot cakes!

I meant to buy a copy but had always put it off. Then, when I heard that this edition was being discontinued in favour of a more conventionally formatted one, I finally put one aside. It went missing. Nobody knew what happened to it, apparently, it just wasn’t there.

In truth, I forgot all about it until it mysteriously re-appeared during this year’s stock check. It had long since been written off from our stock records and so I asked FCB if I could have it.

“Of course,” he replied. “Douglas Coupland? I like him, why wasn’t he in our great American novel promotion?”

“Because he’s Canadian?” I replied.

“Ah,” said FCB. “Stock check. Long night.”