Ain't that a hoot and a holler

Buying hours wrapped up a few minutes ago as I'm writing this, and I'm tidying up the last few books we brought in and I notice that Carl bought The Fall by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan. Not totally out of the blue, mind you, it's a good book and it sells well when we get it in and we get it fairly regularly, maybe every other week or so. BUT. It's weird because just. this. morning. We got copies of the two subsequent volumes of the trilogy. They're harder to come by and it was really random that throughout the course of just one buying day, through different sellers, we managed to complete a series.

It happens sometimes that Carl and I will separately buy a book that we haven't seen before, or is pretty rare, and we get super jazzed and we go to shelve it only to find that the other just bought the same strange book and now our not-so-rare finds sit next to each other on the shelf.

SOMETIMES a customer will walk up to the counter, "Do you have a copy of Le Malentendu by Camus?" We'll double check the shelf but alas no mama-drama from France. The customer will leave, soldiering on to the next shop and pass a customer bearing a dresser drawer full of books. We'll flip through them and lo, there's Caligula, with Le Malentendu in its entirety on pg 36. Happens. all. the. time. Give us your name and number next time. We have a decent success rate in finding what you're after.

It's super rare (happened twice in my tenure) but sometimes there's money in books. I of course have never had the pleasure of such a discovery. It's been Carl BOTH times and it's been a $20 bill BOTH times and it was in a Dean Koontz novel BOTH times. And don't BOTHER flipping through all the books we currently have in stock. You won't find ANYTHING. Not that I'm bitter or anything.