I came upon the term “hand-selling” on Elinor Lipman’s Facebook page, where she was extolling the virtues of booksellers who recommend books to customers.
Though it’s true that many bookstores have closed, squeezed out of business by the Internet - Amazon in particular - the ones that still exist are justly treated as local treasures.
That’s certainly true of my local bookstore, Bartleby’s Books. Closed by the flooding of Tropical Storm Irene, it felt like a miracle when it reopened and it’s been going strong ever since. We neighbors understand the benefits of having a place to browse and buy gifts, as opposed to shopping semi-blind on the Internet.
For instance: I was in the excellent Concord Bookshop in Concord MA and mentioned a novel I’d just finished, the 2014 Pulitzer Prize winner, All the Light We Cannot See about radio in World War II. The bookseller made a fervent counter-pitch for The Narrow Road to the Deep North, by Richard Flanagan. I was curious enough to buy the Flanagan, and found it dazzling.
I’ve had the same experience at Brattleboro’s mystery bookstore, Mystery on Main, where owner, David Wilson, will ply his customer with a few tactful questions, then recommend something that fits the bill exactly. And this, to me, is the best part of walking into a good bookstore.
It’s interesting that a special term has been coined for what used to be a pretty basic interaction between clerk and customer - an exchange most of us took for granted. Once again, our experience of the modern world gallops far beyond our lexicon.
There are many other examples, like “farm-to-table”, which would have baffled our grandparents – industrialized food being a relative novelty until the 50’s. Or “slow-living” for the savoring of meaningful enjoyment of life’s simpler pleasures.
Recently, a nearby big box hardware store folded because it never managed to attract the necessary volume of customers to make the targeted profits corporate headquarters had in mind. Customer loyalty to our downtown hardware store where you can get everything from pot holders to Dremel tools - as well as priceless advice about how to solve household problems - was simply too strong.
I don’t know if there’s a word for this sort of conscious trading, but if there isn’t, there should be. Every small store downtown that’s supported by the conscious choices of its customers is a victory for the good life.
Perhaps if we’re careful to name these experiences, we’ll be less likely to lose them.
