Most bookstore back rooms can tend towards chaos. Mine is no different. The chaos in large part comes from the sheer number of galleys we receive. There are some days our small store gets five galleys, some days even more. And all these books need to find a home.
Usually this home has been a large book box. We always have the best intentions of sorting the boxes either by genre or by date, or in a perfect world by juvenile and adult titles all sorted by date. We were good with the first three boxes to label them roughly by publication date, but with boxes four through nine, the system fell apart. And here’s something you probably can already guess: books in the bottom of the stack of nine boxes seldom got read, because, well, who is really going to take the time to heave all the other boxes aside to get to them?
Elizabeth took matters into her own hands last week and did something revolutionary. She ordered a bookcase for the back room. Sure we have shelves in the back room, but those are primarily for overstock and for returns. There really was no place for the galleys to go, except in their boxes. This all changed when the bookcase arrived.
It fit perfectly, except for that pesky 84th inch. It seems our floor is uneven enough that we lost an inch of ceiling height by the bookcase’s wall. Luckily for us, we have a good friend who’s a carpenter. Amy came over and lopped off an inch hoped it would fit. It didn’t. The floor was just that uneven that Amy had to shear and sand down the case to squeeze in. But, lo and behold we have a bookcase in the back room that’s only for galleys now!
Picking great reading material just got a whole lot easier.