Nora O'Neill

Safe holiday decorations for the bookstore

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Yew looks pretty but is toxic if eaten. Keep it away from kids.

Maybe it’s your first year decorating your brick and mortar, or this year it’s finally YOUR turn to handle the decorating, or with the slow economy, you want to do something really eye-catching. You have such plans!  But first save yourself a lot of headaches by making sure your plans are safe and won’t cause you headaches, literally.  Many popular holiday decorations can be fire hazards, are poisonous to children, or can even induce seizures! Items that are fine in a home setting may be inappropriate in a shop because of the amount of handling they’ll receive, because unsupervised children may get their hands on them, or because you’re a public shop you may have people with special health concerns come in.

PLANTS

I normally go for a natural pine bough wrap around the front banister rather than an artifical one each year since I don’t have to store it and I can compost it to feed my spring flowers.   Live or cut natural materials can be a good choice for decorating, but beware of a few popular items.

Pointsetta

Pointsettas are from the same family as latex and can cause allergic reactions in individuals allergic to latex. Skip these if you have employees you know are allergic. They’re also mildly toxic.  It won’t kill someone to eat them, but will irritate the digestive tract of children and animals and may result in vomiting.  Keep them out of reach of children and store pets.  Pointsettas can also stain things red if crushed.

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Horror: Beyond King & Koontz

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All the standard elements of a gothic cover. The creepy house, the crashing waves or thunder and lightning, and the girl with the heaving bosoms looking over her shoulder. Most of them, the girl isn't wearing shoes.

Horror is dominated by two big Ks:  Stephen King and Dean Koontz.  When someone asks for horror, they’re probably going to get handed one of those two authors.  But beyond that, this is often where people’s knowledge drops off. If they’ve read those, then what?  There’s loads of one hit wonders that churned out one spooky chiller of the week based on whatever was currently hot:  serial killers, Satan, killers animals, etc, and then dropped out of the genre… and sometimes out of writing all together.

Even some big names made a brief foray into horror of the week and then went back to their main genre.  For example, James Patterson “Cradle and All” was originally a much shorter book, “The Virgin”, which was very standard bride of Satan affair in its first incarnation.  Martin Cruz Smith who’s now well known for serious Russian police procedurals wrote “Nightwing”, which features killer vampires bats.

Even King and Koontz themselves went off for a brief foray into other genres.  King’s Dark Tower and Eyes of the Dragon easily qualify as dark fantasy rather than horror per se.  Koontz went even further and wrote gothic romances under the name Leigh Nichols for awhile.  They were later reissued under his own name as horror novels, but the original cover art featured attractive young ladies with heaving bosoms running away from the nameless perils in the cursed mansion.

As such, when someone asks for a recommentation, its often best to determine WHICH books they liked by King or Koontz before making a  recommendation as they may not really want something from the horror genre at all.

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Convention warrior- selling at fairs, conventions, & festivals

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Dealer's hall- Anthrocon 2010

Slow sales for the past year may make trying out a local festival or convention an appealing option.  But the leap from booking a space to actually selling in it can be intimidating, even if you have a brick and mortar location already.  If you’re internet only, it may be even more daunting!

I’m off to FurFright next weekend to sell books to werewolves.  Having done quite a few of these special events, local fairs and festivals, trial and error has revealed quite a few general rules for when you’re selling at an event.

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These books are not for you- the color coded shelves

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Anyone with a bookstore knows that half the time, people don’t read the signs anyway. You could have foot tall leters and they could be looking straight at the sign and still ask you where X is…while looking at the sign for X.

People amble around the shop and clearly aren’t reading titles, just looking for SOMETHING that tells them they’re in the right section.  And the stacks of books themselves tell them when they’ve found it.

Publishers put a lot of effort into the FRONT of the book, but you don’t really think about the SPINE being just as important, especially when shelved.

Quick, you’re looking for books to read.  Which way do you go? Left or right?

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Objects found inside books

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Oh the tales that can be told of the interesting things found in books… and I don’t mean the words!  People use a wide array of things as bookmarks, including some things that you really question WHY they thought this was a good idea.  There’s three things that I find most commonly in books besides bookmarks: photographs, boarding passes, and credit card receipts.  The credit card receipts are slowly fading away as knucklebuster credit card machines disappear, but they were easily the most common thing I saw for a long time.  Giving me the receipt with your credit card number on it just seems like a bad idea…

Boarding passes are fairly self explanatory.  They grabbed a book on the way on and then stuck the boarding pass of ticket stubs in the book.  Airplane passes are the most common.  I occasionally see train stubs, but usually the serious commuters have a rail pass and aren’t buying individual tickets.  Every now and then I’ll see ferry tickets, but they’re rare.

Photographs are also very common, but like the credit card receipts are fading away.  Photographs usually fall into three categories:  everyone has red eye,  a slightly blurry picture of a dog, or a child being frightened at Disney World. You’d think there couldn’t possibly be THAT many pictures of people being frightened on vacation, but probably about 20% of the photos I find show a kid crying their eyes out at Disney World or Disney Land. You can tell the location by the background architecture.  Ones actually showing the kid fleeing in terror from Mickey Mouse are a bit rarer since its the sort of thing parents keep to torment their grown children with.

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Lincoln Child's "Terminal Freeze"

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The backcover splat basically sells Terminal Freeze as scientists in an abandoned sonar research lab in the arctic are eaten by frozen sabretooth tiger.  Throw in a documentary crew who’s there to reveal the defrosted beast, live from the arctic, and you know there’s going to be people dying left and right. There’s also an … Read more

2000 year old technological marvel still in use today

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You could make a drinking game out of headlines proclaiming the death of books.  But the book itself was just a change from previous writing and record keeping systems… and in many cases never fully got rid of the predessors.  Tablets, scrolls, and stone inscriptions are still in use today, they just aren’t the primary form of conveying written information.  Each time there’s a leap forward in written records it doesn’t totally displace the old system, it just expands who has access to writing of any form.

But getting to the book we know today wasn’t exactly a straight path either.  There were stops in between the giant stone block and today’s paperback.  Some alternate systems still persist even today.

Cuneiform was the earliest form of writing and lasted for 3000 years.  The exact appearance shifted over that time, but the basics stayed the same.  Take a wedge shaped stylus into clay to make marks.  Let clay dry (or fire for long term storage).  Then you had a hard, durable record.  Early tablets were primarily used for accounting purposes and then slowly came to be used to record other things.   While these can be broken, cunniform tablets still turn up today.  An archaeological team in Israel recently found cuneiform tablets with some of the earliest known legal texts on them. They’re roughly 3700-3800 years old.

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Some like it damp: creepy crawly critters

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Every book seller has opened up a box and gotten the occasional surprise critter. Or moved something and suddenly seen something scurry off. Eeep!  Most creepy crawlies are harmless to you but they are still a cause for concern.  Many wee beasties think your books are delicious! If you spot them in an incoming box, they’ll also give you a clue where these books were kept.  Or if you’re out at a tag sale, estate sale, or op shop, spotting these beasts lets you know to go shop elsewhere.

All of the following creepy crawlies like HIGH humidity.  If the humidity dips below about 60% they’ll shrivel up and die.  So if you see these beasts in an incoming box you know it’s been somewhere DAMP and that means mold and water damage are very likely.

Do note: these critters are all harmless.  They can’t sting you, bite you, or make you sick.  They can just give you a fright.  There’s pictures of bugs beyond the jump, so the faint of heart may want to skip the rest of this article…

Lepisma saccharina

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