Adam@Home by Rob Harrell for October 10, 2011

She can read, right?

Hope the book she’s looking for has a lot of pictures!

At least she’s trying…right? :)

Let me guess: High school dropout.

“Groans”. Okay, that ranks up there with someone thinking that the campus library is the campus bookstore.

Maybe, if she can remember on which TV show she saw it plugged?

It really looks like they are going to go somewhere to make out.

Hmmm… Laura could be more helpful than shown. If the customer “isn’t sure” of the title, ask her for her best guess, then ask her what it’s about, and where she heard of it. If all else fails, suggest a book that the customer might like. (That involves making certain knee-jerk assumptions about the woman, of course, but every comment here so far is making knee-jerk assumptions about her…)

It’s not just for the sake of making a sale, but perhaps getting a repeat customer. (Next visit: “That lady I talked to last time put me on to this book I really liked. Is she working today?”)

“The title is something like ‘Midnight in Memphis’ or ‘High Noon in Honolulu’, and there’s a dog on the cover, and Ellen mentioned it on her show last week.”

A good bookseller can use that as a starting point.

Been there. Done that. Worked in a book shop. It happens. Really!!!

At least it would be a step forward for Sarah P.

I hope you know what you’re doing Laura.

Good point, Rich. I may be wrong, but it seems that libraria, librarius, and librarium are the feminine, masculine and neuter versions of the same word, and simply mean “related to…”, in this case to books..We do have a lot of words with the suffix -um that mean “the place of…”, but we have others that have no such connotation: modicum, equilibrium, millennium, consortium, and many of the elements of the periodic table.

Do vampire books centering on existential angst have brown covers?

I get asked to find books like this several times a week, (I work in a large public library) I ask what the book is about or do they know a character name