Yesterday some friends and I were browsing the shelves at Barnes & Noble in Union Square. I came across a copy of Stanislaw Lem’s The Cyberiad, and I read aloud the funny poem contained therein about tensor calculus. A passing physics PhD student stopped to listen, and the two of us got to chatting, and before he departed I ended up selling him on picking up a James Morrow novel. I wish I got commissions on stuff like that.
You always hear that in an average year most Americans don’t read a single book. That’s so outside my experience that I have immense difficulty even imagining it, but every once in a while you come face to face with a situation that makes you realize that, yes, that terribly sad statistic is probably true.
A guy in his fifties with a thick accent — sounded like Russian — came up to me and said, “What order are these books?” I replied, “Um, well, they’re alphabetical by author’s last name.” He gave me a look of total, blank incomprehension. I said, “What book are you looking for?,” and he held up a scrap of paper on which was scrawled, Eden Close, Anita Shreve. We were standing right next to the S books, so I said, “Yeah, if they have it, it should be right over here,” and I started scanning the shelves. The guy said, “This is S.” “Yup,” I replied, and continued scanning. He said again, “This is S,” to which I replied, “Yeah, S.” He said, “But the name is ‘Anita.'” I said, “Right, but see, it’s by last name.” “Oh!” he said finally. “Last name!” “Right,” I said, locating the book. “Here you go.” “Thank you!” he said, and went on his way.
So okay, that guy really didn’t know his way around a bookstore, but whatever. He seemed like a nice guy, he wasn’t from around here, etc. But the next person who came up to me, not fifteen minutes later, was 100% American. A teenage girl. She said, “Hey, do you if these books are like, in any kind of order?” I said, “Yeah, alphabetical by author’s last name.” She gave me a look of utter horror and said, “Oh my God, you have got to be kidding me.” (I was not, in fact, kidding her.) I said, “What book are you looking for?” She glanced at a scrap of paper in her hand and said, “Um … ‘The Lovely Bones.'” I said, “Yeah, it’s Alice Sebold. They do have it here. We were actually just looking at it.” She exclaimed, “Really?,” as if I had just done an incredible magic trick. So we fixed her up with the book. Later, I was talking to my friend, and I said, “I still can’t get over how freaked out that girl was when I told her that novels are arranged by author. What was she expecting? And what could be simpler than that?” My friend said, “She probably didn’t realize that you need to know the author’s name to find a book.” “Oh,” I said, “That makes sense. But still, how hard is it to go to the information desk and give them the title and let them find the book for you,” to which my friend replied, “She probably doesn’t know that there is an information desk,” and I realized that, oh geez, he’s probably right.
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