Melville House Books

“I have grown furtive at the keyboard, no longer able to look my staff in the eye as I plot what to drop,” says the unnamed “stockmistress” of the QI Bookshop in Oxford, England. ” The open-to-buy system — which allows me to purchase only as much as I’ve sold — continues its pincer-like attack on the health and happiness of staff and stock.” In a diary she’s keeping for The Daily Telegraph, she explains that “Deciding which titles to stock and for how long is all that I think about most of the time. From a bookseller’s point of view — or at the least from the point of view of a small independent bookseller — the conventions of hardback publishing are antiquated and exasperating. Paperbacks are for reading, hardbacks for keeping. How do you know if you like a book well enough to want to keep if you haven’t read it? The answer is you don’t. So you wait for the paperback. So no one buys the hardback. So the small independent booksellers — who can’t get their books on sale or return but who are none the less brave enough to stock new titles by promising-sounding unknowns — are stuffed. We can, of course, play safe and wait for the paperback ourselves. But that involves passing up on the new and where’s the fun, really, in that?”

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.