‘My Pet Wants a Pet’ by Elise Broach, illus. by Eric Barclay (Henry Holt)<\/p><\/div> When books and customers collide in unusual ways. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24808","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24808","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24808"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24808\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24808"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24808"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24808"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nThere are times when we wonder if the universe lends a hand in\u00a0connecting books with just the right readers. Last week, I was\u00a0looking at some new arrivals when I came upon a charming picture book I’d ordered months ago that just released\u00a0on March 6. “Oh, this book is\u00a0adorable!” I said, remembering it from my sales meeting. I flipped through the pages near a customer who was checking out at\u00a0Laura’s register. I\u00a0turned the book toward\u00a0them\u00a0and continued, “My Pet Wants a Pet<\/a>\u2014<\/em>such\u00a0a great premise!”
\nThe customer whipped her head up from signing her credit card receipt and repeated, “‘My Pet Wants a Pet<\/em>?!’ My granddaughter said that exact same sentence to me on the phone not two days ago. I have to have that book.” It hadn’t even hit the shelf before selling!
\n
\nSure, it was just a coincidence. But it’s a little wild that I happened to pick up\u00a0that particular book\u00a0from\u00a0a stack\u00a0of at least 20, flip through it (which I almost never have time to do during\u00a0a busy day), and happen to comment on it out loud. That grandmother is\u00a0certainly not the only Flying Pig customer who will\u00a0love this book, but I would lay money on her being the only one whose five-year-old granddaughter said\u00a0her pet wanted a pet that week.
\nIf this were the only time coincidences\u00a0happened at the bookstore, I wouldn’t suspect larger forces at work. But serendipity strikes all the time. We’ll be chatting with a customer,\u00a0responding to, say,\u00a0his request for\u00a0adventure nonfiction, and suddenly we’ll\u00a0veer off to the mystery section and pull out a thriller\u00a0set in Latvia. And the customer will say, “Hey, great, that’s perfect! We’re going to Latvia in three weeks.” Or we’ll be in the middle of chatting with an aunt\u00a0seeking Chelsea Handler for her twenty-something niece, and we’ll have an impulse to hand her Moritz Thomsen’s memoir,\u00a0Living Poor: A Peace Corps Chronicle. <\/em>The aunt will be a little startled.\u00a0“How did you know my niece is\u00a0joining the Peace Corps this summer? Tell me about this book!”
\nA few weeks ago, there were two customers in the store, strangers to me and to each other, and I said something about Rainn Wilson’s memoir, The Bassoon King<\/em>, which I’d\u00a0finally gotten around to\u00a0reading after a year and a half of eyeing it on my shelf at home. Turns out, both customers play the bassoon. An inconsequential coincidence, I admit, but come on!
\nThen\u00a0there was the time I met a bookseller at a conference, got to chatting with him about his new apartment in Provincetown, and asked him how he liked it. “My husband and I really enjoy it, but the one who loves it most is our dog.” He pulled out his wallet and showed me a picture. “Oh, Molly!” I said without thinking. The guy blanched. “Her name IS Molly,” he said. “How on earth…” And we both kind of left it there. I blogged about another one of these coincidences, involving my\u00a0totally useless slightly psychic\u00a0ability with\u00a0names<\/a>\u00a0at the bookstore a while back.
\nIt’s beyond weird how often this kind of thing happens, especially\u00a0with customers. Maybe coincidences are all around us, and we only\u00a0pay attention to them when they’re particularly surprising. Maybe bookstores, because they contain so many worlds within worlds, attract people with worlds of experiences, making coincidences that much more likely. Whatever the reason, I suspect my colleagues across the country have their own tales of bizarre and timely collisions between\u00a0bookseller, reader, and book. Want to share yours?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"