Getting Back to Books

      Back in the 90's, I was manager of a great little bookstore in the Pittsburgh Airport--Waterstone's Booksellers. Yes, I know Waterstone's is a huge British chain, but at the time they were testing the waters in America, and after they opened mega stores in Boston and Chicago, they decided to team with WHSmith to try to expand their brand throughout the US in small airport shops. Pittsburgh was the first airport chosen, and after a successful first year under my boss's direction, WHSmith spread the model to several airports around the country. My boss was promoted to open these new stores, and I took over as manager of the original Pittsburgh airport store.
      It was a great store and a great job. Though we were small, and in the airport, we offered thousands of titles in popular fiction, literary fiction, history, business, travel, self-help, poetry, science, biography, children's books, and on and on. I can proudly say that sales increased every year I was there. Although Grisham, Clancy, King and the like paid a lot of the bills, we also sold more than our fair share of books like "Longitude," "The Professor and the Madman," "Guns, Germs and Steel," "A Tour of the Calculus," and hundreds of other titles that people were surprised and delighted to find in an airport bookshop. The key to our success was that the other booksellers and I had full control over the store's inventory. Everything on the shelves was chosen by us, and though we were in fact a chain store, we had the spirit of an independent.
      I read more books in those years than I ever had before, and I miss the freebies from publishers and the daily book-talk with regular customers (yes, even the airport has regular customers) who trusted me to know their taste and recommend new books that they would enjoy, or even love. I've tried to keep up with the book world in the years since I left Pittsburgh, but it's sometimes frustrating to find myself surprised by the appearance of a new book by a favorite author that, in the past, I would have known was coming three or four months before it ever hit the shelves.
      That's what happened to me recently when I went to my little local branch library and saw a new collection of short stories from Roddy Doyle called "The Deportees." I discovered Doyle in my Waterstone's days, and happily devoured the Barrytown trilogy of books--"The Van," "The Snapper," and "The Commitments"--as well as the darker and more serious "Paddy Clarke, Ha, Ha, Ha" and "The Woman Who Walked Into Doors." The stories in "The Deportees," including the titular return of Jimmy Rabitte from "The Commitments," are fairly light and disposable, having been written quickly under some unusual constraints to be published in a periodical, but they still overflow with Doyle's trademark humor and human insight. Reading them convulsively over the course of maybe a day and a half reminded me of the joy of discovery in those Waterstone's days, and convinced me to rededicate myself to a more disciplined reading regimen, including laying out some of my reactions to the books here, as I've been doing with some of the movies I've watched recently. So keep an eye out.