Looking for a Book: a Parable

by

Nicki Leone

This is a story about a woman looking for a book. It’s not about me, but I come in at the end. It’s about Carol, who, if asked, would say that she loves to read. Lately, thanks to the economy and an enforced early retirement, Carol and her husband John are reading more than ever—they have a lot more time now, and a lot less money to spend on doing other things they like, such as eating out or going on vacation to the lesser-visited Caribbean islands.

Carol and John like mysteries, especially those set in sunny southern climes with Jimmy Buffet-style beaches. Back when they used to go island-hopping, I would give them “beach reading” to take along—the most important prerequisites being that the books contain actual beaches, at least a few margaritas or drinks with umbrellas, and a murder mystery that the detective could solve wearing flip flops. You may think that wouldn’t leave much in the way of choices, but in point of fact beach-bum, semi-alcoholic, flip-flop-wearing detectives are one of the more popular varieties of murder mystery. We owe so much to Travis McGee.

Since I stopped working in a bookstore and Carol and John stopped working altogether, I haven’t had much occasion to be recommending books to them. But Carol is a resourceful woman motivated by the discovery that, as happily married as they are and have been for thirty-four  years, retirement has shown that the house can be a wee bit small when the two people in it have nothing to do. Frugal by nature and by necessity, she is a dedicated library-goer and has been making her way through the local branch mystery section slowly but systematically.

So I was a little surprised to hear her say, when last we spoke, that she had just come back from the bookstore. “What did you get?” I asked, always curious about the books my friends are buying. “Oh, Nicki,” she laughed, “I have to tell you the story of this book.”

It turns out that one of the writers Carol and her husband have become fond of is Tom Corcoran. He writes mysteries that are set in Key West. “They’re light and fun,” said Carol to me, “and he really gets the setting down. John and I like to pull out the map and follow along with the story. He’s really, really good at portraying the town.” Corcoran has enjoyed a steady and respectable career as a mystery writer; his Alex Rutledge Key West mysteries have been coming out about once every two or three years since his debut title, The Mango Opera, was first released in 1998. This was followed by Gumbo Limbo (1999), Bone Island Mambo (2001), Octopus Alibi (2003), and Air Dance Iguana (2005). You can see the general theme developing. Our library has stocked all of his books for circulation, and if library books still had those little checkout cards in a pocket in the back, you would have seen John or Carol’s name at the top of each one.

“So I was really surprised,” Carol said to me, “when I found out last year that Corcoran had a new book, and the library didn’t have it. They didn’t even have it in their system.”

On the advice of the librarian at the information desk, Carol filled out a “patron request” form to have the new book, Hawk Channel Chase (2009) added to the collection. “It was basically a purchase order,” she told me, “a patron’s purchase order.”  She handed the form in to the librarian, who dutifully filed it away and promised Carol that she would be the first person notified when the book arrived. That was in May, 2009. Months passed, and nobody called. So half a year later, Carol asked at the desk about the status of her request. “Oh,” said the librarian, “it looks like it wasn’t available from our usual supplier, so it is taking longer to get.” She assured Carol that she was still at the top of the list of people to be called, though, when the book finally came in.

Three months later, Carol inquired again. The book was on order. She was on the top of the list. Carol started checking at monthly intervals. More than a year after she has first filled out her patron request, the person at the desk told her “It’s in the system!” This meant, apparently, that Hawk Channel Chase now existed in a kind of transient state between having been received for processing and being actually shelved. Carol was still at the top of the list.

A month after that, Carol walked into the library to ask about the book, and was told that it was in the collection. Why didn’t anyone call her, she asked. The person at the desk couldn’t say. There wasn’t any note about it on the book’s collection record. But, the book was apparently in the building, so Carol and the librarian went looking for it, found it shelved exactly where it was supposed to be, and Carol, fourteen months after first discovering its existence, finally got to take Hawk Channel Chase home.

The reason the library had such a difficult time finding and ordering the book was probably because at some point between the publication of Air Dance Iguana in 2005 and Hawk Channel Chase last year, Tom Corcoran switched publishers. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he lost or dropped his publisher. Up until 2005, Corcoran had been with St. Martin’s Press under their Minotaur imprint—a house that has a good reputation for publishing mysteries, especially the kinds of mysteries that become series. But something must have happened—either the publisher tired of waiting for Corcoran to become Dan Brown, or the author tired of waiting for his publisher to make him Dan Brown—because Hawk Channel Chase was published not with St. Martin’s, but with Ketch & Yawl Press, which is pretty obviously the author’s own.

It’s not an uncommon thing to see established authors go this route. Sometimes their contracts are not renewed because the publisher—always cash-strapped—just can’t afford the resources required to continue the series. Sometimes (quite often, in fact) the author’s own editor at the publishing house leaves, effectively “orphaning” the writer within the company, without an advocate to fight for them at editorial meetings. Sometimes established writers, with multiple books and proven track records—like Corcoran—just get frustrated as they are asked to do more and more marketing on their own, and can rely less and less on publisher support. If you are going to do all the work, one might reasonably ask, why not make all the money?

I have no idea which case applies to Tom Corcoran and his latest Alex Rutledge mystery, but whatever happened he obviously decided that it made sense to publish his new book on his own. On the up side, that means he was able to publish the book. On the down side, it meant that his new book sometimes got overlooked by purchasing departments like the one at our county library, who probably never heard of Ketch & Yawl Press. And it takes someone like my persistent friend Carol to bring it to their attention.

Carol, like most readers, was oblivious to, and apathetic about, issues of publisher availability. It’s likely that if she hadn’t had to actually fill out that patron request in the first place, she never would have noticed that Hawk Channel Chase was put out by different publisher than Corcoran’s other books. She was just happy to have the new book by a favorite writer.

Unfortunately, there was a problem. “The way Corcoran writes,” Carol told me, “is that there are a lot of threads and apparently unconnected things that all get tied up in the end.” I nodded at the phone. This is a tried and true method of the genre.  Carol paused. “The book was missing the thirty pages near the end,” she said.

I’ll admit it. I burst out laughing. We’d been on the phone for twenty minutes while she told me the saga of her pursuit of this book. “Oh, god.” I said “I know,” she said back, “I couldn’t believe it.”

Carol brought the book back to the library and explained the problem. They checked the collection records and discovered that another copy existed in another branch across town. The librarian offered to have it transferred over on the next truck, but then—wise to the ways of the system—thought it best to call first and have the book checked to make sure it contained those last thirty pages. It didn’t.

“We can place another order,” offered the librarian. But Carol, having waited patiently for fourteen months for the copy in her hands, was disinclined to go through the whole process again. Plus, she told me over the phone, how would we know that the new book wouldn’t have the same problem? “You wouldn’t,” I answered. “It probably affected an entire print run.”

So Carol turned the defective book into the library, and went across the street to Barnes & Noble, ready to just buy the darn thing so she could find out how it ended. “It wasn’t in their system,” she sighed. “They couldn’t even find a listing to be able to order it.” The clerk asked if Carol had an ISBN number, and Carol looked at him like he was from Mars. “No.” she said. I interrupted here to tell her that an ISBN was the product number on the back of the book, but that they should have been able to find the book without it. “Like I go around memorizing product numbers” she grumbled. I could see her point.

Carol walked out, frustrated, and called her husband from the parking lot. He read off the telephone numbers of every other bookstore listed in the Yellow Pages and she started calling them, while sitting in her car in the lot, the air conditioning cranked. “I wasn’t about to drive all over town,” she huffed. Books-A-Million didn’t have Hawk Channel Chase. It wasn’t in their system. Finally she rang up one of our independent bookstores. “We don’t have it,” they told her, no surprise, “but we can order it for you.” Carol explained about the missing thirty pages and asked what if the ordered book had the same problem. “Well, we’ll check when it arrives, and let you know if it’s okay. If it isn’t we can call the publisher and get a replacement.” But how long would it take to order, Carol wondered. The bookseller consulted a computer. “Two days,” she answered. “We’ll call you when it comes in.”

Now Carol has heard the phrase “we’ll call you” fairly often over the last year, so she wasn’t holding her breath. But sure enough two days later the store—a tiny place called Two Sisters Bookery—gave her a call to say the book had come in, and that they had checked, and the last thirty pages were there. When I rang her, she had just got home from the store.  “I can finally finish it!” she said triumphantly. And then, as an afterthought, “John’s been waiting to read it too.”

“Carol,” I laughed, “you should write the author and tell him this story.” She said she had thought about it during the months she waited on Hawk Channel Chase to show up at the library. She even went so far as to look up the author’s website to see if she could e-mail him. “I thought he might want to know that the library wasn’t carrying his new book.”  But in the end she didn’t. “Well you should e-mail him now,” I said. “He’d love this story—he would probably send you a free signed book. I would, if I were him.”

What really struck me while I was listening to and laughing at this epic saga of a book-hunt is how different Carol and I are when it comes to finding something to read. The last hard-to-find book I went after was an obscure play written by George Wilkins—the man known to have collaborated with William Shakespeare on Pericles.  I spent a little time searching the Internet before I found a used bookseller in Kansas that had a collection of English Renaissance Drama that included Wilkins, and a little more time on the World Cat database before I found a free e-book version I could download to consult until my printed version arrived three days later. The whole search took twenty minutes and the only travel involved was when I got up to walk in the kitchen to refill my coffee.  While Carol and I were talking on the phone, I had my laptop up and within five minutes had found Tom Corcoran’s website, and discovered several places where I could get all his books, even the new one.

“You know,” I said at one point, “most people would have just ordered the thing from Amazon instead and had it in a couple days.” But Carol doesn’t like to buy things on the Internet and doesn’t see the point of buying a book she can get at the library. “Besides,” she said, “it still might have been missing those pages.” I thought this was probably likely, and a valid point.

But her story made me feel kind of hopeful, and not just because my local indie bookseller came off looking rather good in the whole affair. No, it was Carol’s sheer persistence that filled me with admiration and made me feel a little humble. I work in an industry where speed is expected. Where the effort involved in getting a book is measured in the number of clicks you make on your mouse (and where anything more than two clicks is considered excessive, too much to expect from the customer). Many of the avid readers I know have embraced e-readers like Amazon’s Kindle not just because it takes almost no space or because e-books are cheaper than paper, but because it reduces the two days it takes to receive a book you’ve ordered down to about thirty seconds. Click, click, clickety-click. We talk about “convenience” but we really mean “instantaneous gratification.”

Most of us would find it ridiculous to wait a month to get a book, much less a year and a half. We’d give up; there are too many other books to read. Tom Corcoran’s Alex Rutledge would just fall by the wayside, end up sitting on his beach drinking margaritas, and wondering if he’d ever get another case. But Carol doesn’t care about the ongoing struggles between online booksellers and brick-and-mortar stores, between printed books and e-books, or the changing nature of an industry where a book is published every two minutes and only a small percentage of them will actually make anyone any money. Carol doesn’t care about any of that. She is just a woman who likes to read, who wanted a new book by a favorite author, and thought it was worth some extra effort to get it.

You know, I hope that there are more readers like her than like me.

Books mentioned in this column:
The Mango Opera by Tom Corcoran (St. Martin’s Press, 1998)
Gumbo Limbo by Tom Corcoran (St. Martin’s Press, 1999)
Bone Island Mambo by Tom Corcoran (St. Martin’s Press, 2001)
Octopus Alibi by Tom Corcoran (St. Martin’s Press, 2003)
Air Dance Iguana by Tom Corcoran (St. Martin’s Press, 2005)
Hawk Channel Chase by Tom Corcoran (Ketch & Yawl Press, 2009)

Nicki Leone showed her proclivities early when as a young child she asked her parents if she could exchange the jewelry a well-meaning relative had given her for Christmas for a dictionary instead. She supported her college career with a part-time job in a bookstore, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that her college career and attending scholarships and financial aid loans supported her predilection for working as a bookseller. She has been in the book business for over twenty years. Currently she works for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, developing marketing and outreach programs for independent bookstores. Nicki has been a book reviewer for several magazines, her local public radio station and local television stations. She was one of the founders of The Cape Fear Crime Festival, currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network, and as Managing Editor of BiblioBuffet. Plus, she blogs at Will Read for Food. She manages all this by the grace of a very patient partner and the loving support of varying numbers of dogs and cats. Contact Nicki.