A View From Corona #9

July 28th 2002 at 11:48 am

Working in a genre specialty bookstore in the heart of San Francisco’s Mission district gives me a very unique perspective. The store gets a lot of foot traffic. A lot of “straight” people who don’t read the genre, and/or don’t read fiction in general sometimes mistakenly stumble through the doors. When they do, I try to be as accommodating as possible, and more often than not, I can get them to leave with a book that is just right for them. My favorite example of this is when a gentleman came in looking for travel books, specifically books about Bed & Breakfasts, because he needed a gift for a friend who was opening a B&B in Memphis, TN. He ended up leaving with “the perfect gift”, a contemporary horror anthology, More Monsters From Memphis. A similar, but rather depressing thing happened this weekend. A gentleman came in and asked for automobile books. I apologized, and told him what the store specialized in, and he pondered that… “Horror… I like Horror. I love Tales from the Crypt”. I told him we had some graphic novels, but didn’t really have any movie or media tie in stuff. Instead, we mainly had novels and short stories. “Books without pictures?” he asked. Yeah. Books without pictures.