The first two weeks of January feel a bit like "cleaning house" at the store, as we take down all the Christmas displays and decorations, examine our sales from the past year, pull books that haven’t sold in several months, prepare to do an inventory of everything on our shelves, and start fresh with everything in good, trim working order, with enough space to accommodate all the incoming spring books.

When it comes to pulling books to be returned to their publishers during these two weeks, though, I become (metaphorically) the worst kind of nail-biter, and a cynical one at that. As I look over inventory reports for each of our publishers deciding what books to weed, I become convinced that the titles I’m returning are going to win a major award when the ALA announces their "big ones" — this year it’s next Monday, January 14th.

Murphy’s Law and prior experience pretty much guarantee that this is going to happen with at least one of the books we’ve returned at some point during the year. That title that came in last January and we returned in June because it still hadn’t sold a single copy? It’s going to win the Caldecott Medal. That middle grade novel I originally ordered just two copies of, haven’t heard a peep about, haven’t had a chance to read, and haven’t seen any marketing for? You know that the Newbery committee is going to give it an Honor five minutes after UPS carts it away in a returns box.

It is painful beyond painful to have had a book on your shelves, have returned it (whether you knew it and loved it or not) and then have to scramble to get your hands on more copies in the awards day frenzy that wipes out every available book in your distributors’ warehouses and the publishers’ shelves. What’s hard is trying to explain to customers that you aren’t a "BAD" bookstore or a clueless bookseller, just because you couldn’t predict that, out of a pool of hundreds of potential winners, these 15 or so books will be the ones everyone would want come January and didn’t, therefore, order vast quantities of them before the big announcements. Years of *trying* to predict, failing, and winding up with too many extra copies of this book or that book have left me gun shy as far as making bold predictions goes. And as for the possibility of spreading things a bit thinner, imagine if I ordered 20 copies of each of the titles on this Mock Caldecott list (chosen at random from those that appeared in my Google search), for example. Our shelves would bulge at the seams, I’d be obscenely over-budget, and… well, you can guess the rest. Hello, unemployment!

Why not wait until after January 14 to return books, you ask? Because after January 14 we are busy, busy, busy with sales rep after sales rep, which leaves Lorna and me little time to spend on the big task of weeding the previous year’s leftovers. More importantly, Evelyn, our store’s accounting guru (and one of our owners!), has worked out some expert sort of returns schedule that we are loathe to deviate from. If she says it’s the week to send books back to Random House, we do.

Except maybe for that book — the one that I think *maybe* the Printz committee will have had their eye on. Or that title that, golly, I REALLY would love to see get *something*, as it’s about time that illustrator got some notice! Or… well, you get the idea. Just don’t be surprised if you see me chasing after the UPS truck next Monday. Or pleading with the Fed Ex guy. Or just bashing my head against the wall.