Friday, June 17, 2016

Today at Logos

 I brought in another Blue Apron box and another bag of books to Logos today.  Ned is making such progress on my office that I will soon have to see if I have gotten rid of enough books or if more strict downsizing is required!

My first customer today was a mom with two kids, who spent some time in the kids room.  Her son bought a kid's mystery (not Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys)

A woman in a SF Giants cap bought a contemporary fiction book, a story which takes place in China.

A quartet of young women came in.  One was tall, wearing tight fitting torn jeans and a floppy brimmed hat.  The three others had short-short shorts and one of those had a hat too.  They went half way down one aisle and across through another, each one of them dragging her hand across the books, without stopping to look at them, and then out the front door again.  Weird.

A grown up childhood friend of our kids bought a book on the history of Middle Earth.  We discussed the Davis heat and I mentioned how I was enjoying these 75⁰ days this week.  He says he is too, but his garden doesn't do well when it's cooler and that when the temps zoom up 30⁰ to over 100⁰ later this week, all of the veggies in his garden will go crazy.

A lovely British lady spent some time in the children's room and bought a book of trees and a book of butterflies, along with a bargain book she found outside.

A rugged looking guy bought 2 books on hiking in California. He also bought an art book and book on the history of the English language.  He paid by credit card and we discussed how the new computer chips are so much slower, and wondering how their security is.

A curly-headed guy wearing camouflage shorts with black socks that went up past his knees, a Cal Aggie sweatshirt and a lanyard with "East Bay" printed on it bought a geography book.

A short stocky woman with a short pony tale bought a bargain book and a contemporary fiction.

An older woman carrying an Avid Reader bag (that's the store that sells new books a block away) came n looking for "Engineers of Victory" by Paul Kennedy and "The End of the Wild" by Stephen Meyer ("With the extinction rate at 3000 species a year and accelerating, we can now predict that as many as half of the Earth's species will disappear within the next 100 years.")  We didn't have either and I wonder if they had them at the Avid Reader, since she had just come from there.

A guy in a wheel chair (Craig) came in, his first time in the store.  A very nice man but shortly after he came in, Ralph came striding into shake his hand and mine.  He apparently thought we owned the store and wanted to sell us advertising in a university publication.  Ralph took notes about the store and then left.  Craig never had a chance to look at books and he left too.

My friend came in at 4:20 and hit the jackpot today.  He bought three old books -- "Cathedrals," "Monasteries" and "Abbeys."  He also bought a Dick Francis bargain book and a history book.  His stack was so large he had to buy a 25-cent bag to carry it all in.

While he was there a guy with a scarf on his head came in to buy a bargain book.  He reeked of cigarettes and was carrying a cigarette lighter in his hands.  As he left, he told me he found it odd that the word "denomination" could mean either the size of a paper money bill or the brand of religion you followed.  That's when he told me he had Aspbergers Syndrome and how sometimes weird thoughts like that come to him.

A very tin woman with tight black pants and a salmon colored shirt with matching colored tennis shoes bought two literature books, works of Hemmingway and of James.

Her friend bought "Siddhartha" and was insistent on asking me if the "#65" on the spine of the book meant it was printed in 1965.

An older couple came in with armloads of books to donate and were followed by a friend of Susan's with a book to donate as well.  It was by Edna O'Brien, a favorite author of his wife's but she didn't like this particular book and he wanted Susan to know that.  By way of explanation, he said that he thought the author was "in her 70s now, and not hip."  I took offense.  (But then I wasn't "hip" in my 30s either!)

A tall guy came in and was looking at books by Evelyn Waugh (which he pronounced EEEvelyn not the British way with a short "e").  He was waiting for the basketball game to come on and I got the idea he was just hanging around until he could find somewhere with a TV set that he could watch.  I don't think he had any money.  But he talked and talked and talked and I just wanted him to go away.

"Eliza" and I guess her mother came.  Eliza was dressed in the least amount of clothes I've ever seen her (i.e., her shoulders were bare) and when she took her baby out of the front pack to toddle around the store, she left off the shawl she usually wears.  I could see that she had a haircut and looked very cute.  The daughter was adorable and brought joy to the shop for the time they were there.  I don't think they bought anything and when it was time to leave, baby went back in the backpack and all the wrap around Indian garb went back on again, with the shawl over hear head and around the baby again.  I think maybe she just came in to cool off.

Susan and dog Sammy came in early and we chatted a bit.

Almost the last customer were a couple.  The woman wore a black t-shirt with the word FEMINIST spelled out in big, bold pink letters across her chest.  They bought 3 kids' books, a book on Freud, and a book on geometry.

The very last customer, though I didn't ring him up, was Walt.  We had packed up and were leaving when he looked in the window and spied a book about the towns along the Thames from Oxford to London--we had taken that trip on our very first river cruise (where there were only 8 passengers) and he decided to buy it.

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