Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops
Posted by: Cindy Dobrez and Lynn Rutan
Cindy: The folks at Twitter sent me an email telling me that they’d missed me. Aw, shucks. So I was guilted into logging in and making a little chirp and then I scanned some of the tweets that had piled up. This gem was found amongst Neil Gaiman’s offerings: Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops. Collected by Jen Campbell, a 24-year-old writer and bookshop employee in London, these comments were so popular that she’s decided to make this a regular feature of her blog This is Not the Six Word Novel. Here’s one of my favorites:
Customer: Hi, do you have any new books?
Me: We’re an antiquarian bookshop – our stock is out of print books.
Customer: So other people have touched them?
Me: Presumably, yes.
Customer: I don’t think I’ll bother, thanks.
Me: OK.
Lynn: This is my favorite – mostly because it sounds like a lot of the requests I used to get in a school library!
Customer: There was a book in the 80s that I loved… but I can’t remember the title.
Me: Can you remember anything about it?
Customer: I think it was called 365 fairy tales.
Me: *searches on wholesaler website* Nothing under that name, sorry.
Customer: I might have got the number wrong. Could you just type in ‘fairy tales’ and see what comes up?
Of course there’s always the customer who can’t remember the name of the book but he knows it was red. Sigh
How about you out there? Any good customer stories you want to share?
