Some scribbly scrawl on the title page caught my eye. I borrowed the wife's phone and performed an image search on Sebald's signature. Paydirt.
A Keyword search of 'Sebald' 'Emigrants' 'signed' on AbeBooks lists one result, a British edition priced north of $340. Any signed softcover or hardcover Sebald fetches collector prices. Fella's been dead awhile now.
Third Place's signed copy was priced at $7.99. That's not to finger waggle at incompetence.
Working for Half Price Books, I pulled several gems out of the buy table slush. Two I remember distinctly. An Advance Reading Copy of the first volume of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle and even more exciting, an ARC for The Crossing, the second volume of Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy.
Third Place's signed copy was priced at $7.99. That's not to finger waggle at incompetence.
Working for Half Price Books, I pulled several gems out of the buy table slush. Two I remember distinctly. An Advance Reading Copy of the first volume of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle and even more exciting, an ARC for The Crossing, the second volume of Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy.
On the other end of the same stick, I once got dressed down for not noticing the collectibility of a trade paperback version of Even Cowgirls Get The Blues.
Half Price is doing a slow burn impression of the Titanic. Truthfully, I'm flabbergasted they haven't eighty-sixed their long-time bricks and mortar business model for selling chiefly online. Third Place is a different beast. There aren't 130 stores spread pell-mell across the nation. They don't host ill-advised, soul-searing flash mobs. It's local. Even so, one would assume it can use every last injection of juice available.
Feeling equal parts the very exemplar of moral behavior and kinship to the book-employed, I took that signed Sebald to the Third Place buy counter and in as modest and diplomatically a manner possible related the discovery and a hope the book would be repriced.
I don't know if the buyer thought I was 'mansplaining' or if she was already in a bad mood, but the interaction left me convinced I was a rube, I was wasting her time, and my interest in helping increase their potential profits was wholly unwarranted.
Confused and perturbed by the experience, I went the extra mile in dinkdom, crawled up the chain of command and related the interaction to someone anointed as a 'keyholder' before my wife made her purchases and we left the store.
*
Look at that mug. Robert Crais is a good looking guy. To a certain degree, he resembles his most noted creation, Elvis Cole, a terminally sardonic but fully capable Los Angeles P.I.
I discovered Crais shortly after moving to L.A. and starting work at a Brentano's bookstore. This is the period where Crais and fellow L.A. crime writer Michael Connelly were in the infant stages of ascendancy (and with a hit streaming show and some 60 million book sales to date, Connelly not only outpaced Crais but reigns as one of the crime genres undisputed 800-pound gorillas).
I liked Connelly. I looooooooved Crais. Entrusted to fill the Brentano's Paperback Bestseller racks, I fudged reality and jammed that #1 slot full of Sunset Express. Back in 'Mystery', Crais titles always got the face out for maximum exposure.
When an agent-accompanied Crais did an unannounced drop-in to the store, I breathlessly gathered stock for the man of the hour to sign. Unfortunately, I tried to engage him in conversation. Stuttering, muttering, sweating, there's no way I didn't come off as the potent culmination of several generations worth of intensive incest.
Brentano's had been inhaled by Waldenbooks. In their infinite wisdom, some parent company higher up decided Crais was one of those authors on the brink. He could benefit from a push towards the spotlight and Waldenbooks would benefit on the back end from a spike in sales.
So some sort of lunch with Bob was arranged. At least two folks from each L.A. area store would sit down and gnosh and iron out a path to the promised land.
Like a dimwit, I thought I'd be one of the people invited to the lunch. Most of management knew how much I loved the guy.
Right there is the stickler, perceptible to the Old Man Logan version of Brian. An understanding of politics, how it infects and informs and influences everything under the sun.
One of the oh-so-many timeless lines from Blade Runner is, "You know the score, pal. You're not cop, you're little people."
In bookstore reality, as in any reality, "You're not management, you're little people."
The managers returned from the Crais lunch with a gift: a galley of L.A. Requiem, the as-yet-unreleased and rumoredly epic Elvis Cole novel. I didn't actually chuck it to the ground and grimly drop trou and anoint the manuscript in bodily waste, but my general demeanor probably indicated I was in a paint it black frame of mind.
It gets better.
One of the Assistant Managers was friends with Crais's kid. Every now and then they'd hold Buffy and Angel viewing parties...at Crais's house.
Doubly bedeviled, I still wasn't so immature that I tore up my Elvis Cole novels or bad mouthed the books to customers.
I regularly remind the wife I don't have a heart. In its stead is a hunk of black ice. It fuels an interior Gulag where I place the things once adored that prove too painful to pursue. I took all my love for Crais and shipped it off to the ice realm where still it remains, underfed, underclothed, inhaling coal dust, or whatever sport is in season.
*
I've only dipped a toe into Sebald. Mostly just his poetry, leaving his novels and his celebrated memoir-fiction-history mash-ups for later.
After my experience trying to get his signature some props, it seems likely W.G. needs to pack his bags. And pack for the cold.
Experience in trying to marry customer to product was instructive. It's always a total chance proposition that the right customer walks into a used bookstore and finds that collectible they can't live without, personal budget be damned.
Feeling equal parts the very exemplar of moral behavior and kinship to the book-employed, I took that signed Sebald to the Third Place buy counter and in as modest and diplomatically a manner possible related the discovery and a hope the book would be repriced.
I don't know if the buyer thought I was 'mansplaining' or if she was already in a bad mood, but the interaction left me convinced I was a rube, I was wasting her time, and my interest in helping increase their potential profits was wholly unwarranted.
Confused and perturbed by the experience, I went the extra mile in dinkdom, crawled up the chain of command and related the interaction to someone anointed as a 'keyholder' before my wife made her purchases and we left the store.
*
Look at that mug. Robert Crais is a good looking guy. To a certain degree, he resembles his most noted creation, Elvis Cole, a terminally sardonic but fully capable Los Angeles P.I.
I discovered Crais shortly after moving to L.A. and starting work at a Brentano's bookstore. This is the period where Crais and fellow L.A. crime writer Michael Connelly were in the infant stages of ascendancy (and with a hit streaming show and some 60 million book sales to date, Connelly not only outpaced Crais but reigns as one of the crime genres undisputed 800-pound gorillas).
I liked Connelly. I looooooooved Crais. Entrusted to fill the Brentano's Paperback Bestseller racks, I fudged reality and jammed that #1 slot full of Sunset Express. Back in 'Mystery', Crais titles always got the face out for maximum exposure.
When an agent-accompanied Crais did an unannounced drop-in to the store, I breathlessly gathered stock for the man of the hour to sign. Unfortunately, I tried to engage him in conversation. Stuttering, muttering, sweating, there's no way I didn't come off as the potent culmination of several generations worth of intensive incest.
Brentano's had been inhaled by Waldenbooks. In their infinite wisdom, some parent company higher up decided Crais was one of those authors on the brink. He could benefit from a push towards the spotlight and Waldenbooks would benefit on the back end from a spike in sales.
So some sort of lunch with Bob was arranged. At least two folks from each L.A. area store would sit down and gnosh and iron out a path to the promised land.
Like a dimwit, I thought I'd be one of the people invited to the lunch. Most of management knew how much I loved the guy.
Right there is the stickler, perceptible to the Old Man Logan version of Brian. An understanding of politics, how it infects and informs and influences everything under the sun.
One of the oh-so-many timeless lines from Blade Runner is, "You know the score, pal. You're not cop, you're little people."
In bookstore reality, as in any reality, "You're not management, you're little people."
The managers returned from the Crais lunch with a gift: a galley of L.A. Requiem, the as-yet-unreleased and rumoredly epic Elvis Cole novel. I didn't actually chuck it to the ground and grimly drop trou and anoint the manuscript in bodily waste, but my general demeanor probably indicated I was in a paint it black frame of mind.
It gets better.
One of the Assistant Managers was friends with Crais's kid. Every now and then they'd hold Buffy and Angel viewing parties...at Crais's house.
Doubly bedeviled, I still wasn't so immature that I tore up my Elvis Cole novels or bad mouthed the books to customers.
I regularly remind the wife I don't have a heart. In its stead is a hunk of black ice. It fuels an interior Gulag where I place the things once adored that prove too painful to pursue. I took all my love for Crais and shipped it off to the ice realm where still it remains, underfed, underclothed, inhaling coal dust, or whatever sport is in season.
*
I've only dipped a toe into Sebald. Mostly just his poetry, leaving his novels and his celebrated memoir-fiction-history mash-ups for later.
After my experience trying to get his signature some props, it seems likely W.G. needs to pack his bags. And pack for the cold.
Experience in trying to marry customer to product was instructive. It's always a total chance proposition that the right customer walks into a used bookstore and finds that collectible they can't live without, personal budget be damned.
A display case at the Capitol Hill Half Price location featured signed Eric Powell convention sketchbooks and even a copy of his infamous Satan's Sodomy Baby one-shot. There were even comic books signed by the late great Michael Turner. None of those goodies were exorbitantly priced. Arguably, they were underpriced, but if memory serves me right, those gems did an impression of the ark of the covenant; dumped into boxes, they are stored in some remote warehouse, gathering dust ever since the location went belly-up.
To a large degree, wielding the W.G., I know I overloaded the disarming quotient. I will never be Hugh Grant. Trying to be charming, I come across like some seasoned shady haunter of the freeway rest stop, biding my time until the right plump fly stumbles into the web.
Given that, my Sebald interruption could only be processed as intrusion. Desperate airs towards not mansplaining backfire and can only resonate as by-the-book exercises in the putrid MS.
And again, although her responding attitude still leaves a bad taste in my mouth, I recognize most bookstore employees carry with them an implacable notion of geography - the defined borders between customer and employee. Any random jerk placing a toe over the line risks enshrinement in the rogue's gallery.
Which is fine. Being thought of as a creep is a comfort zone, just as I'm well-tread minding the ice cored in the ribs. And Bob can't help but be happy for the learned company. W.G. was a professor for years and years before attempting the trade book route. Besides, based on the image below, Sebald already knows how to rock a scarf. And those whiskers will only grow in resplendency threaded with thick laces of quick to form and then uninterrupted ice.
Given that, my Sebald interruption could only be processed as intrusion. Desperate airs towards not mansplaining backfire and can only resonate as by-the-book exercises in the putrid MS.
And again, although her responding attitude still leaves a bad taste in my mouth, I recognize most bookstore employees carry with them an implacable notion of geography - the defined borders between customer and employee. Any random jerk placing a toe over the line risks enshrinement in the rogue's gallery.
Which is fine. Being thought of as a creep is a comfort zone, just as I'm well-tread minding the ice cored in the ribs. And Bob can't help but be happy for the learned company. W.G. was a professor for years and years before attempting the trade book route. Besides, based on the image below, Sebald already knows how to rock a scarf. And those whiskers will only grow in resplendency threaded with thick laces of quick to form and then uninterrupted ice.
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