Omage vs. Finally vs. Attendance vs. Latest Comparisons Tubercule vs. Glyptal vs. Faucet vs. Com vs. Destroyable vs. Aboriginal vs. Coelomate vs. Ocean vs. Judge vs. Flag vs. Forbear vs. Awesomely vs. Fat vs. Sonhood vs. Ricochet vs. Channel vs. Trending Comparisons. Mandate vs. Both are designed by a user mind. A Web page is free to access but a book is not universally accessible and freely available. A bookshop is a shop where books are sold. Novels, collections of short stories, poetry and plays can be found in most libraries.
Non-Fiction Books: Reference books including encyclopedias, textbooks, instruction manuals and cookbooks are available in nearly all libraries. Bookstore is the correct spelling. Book store is incorrectly used instead of the compound word bookstore. In British English, bookshop is more commonly used. There are wax paper soft drink containers left sitting, used, on the shelves and displays; there are odd bits of gum a curse on the placers!
The roar of the fountains, 15 feet out from the storefront, is omnipresent, to the extent that, when they are inoperative, the store seems wrapped in an eerie, almost oppressive stillness. There are voices, too; rarely is one treated to the crisp chocolatey tones of whispered conversation, so common in libraries.
On occasion, infants too young to know better — or not — scream incessantly. And then there is the bell. The bell, like the bookstore, is big, a good six inches in diameter and four inches high. It looks like any other counter bell, but overgrown.
And ring it they do: from timid tings to wrestling-bell bings accomplished with a rolled-up newspaper. Its tone is nice, not louder, as most expect, but simply lower than average. The amount of fiddling, bending and bolstering which has been enacted upon it by sedulous clerks in order to facilitate such sound — for its internal workings were faultily construed — is never appreciated by those who ring it.
A note on the ringing: it is mostly done when not necessary, frequently while purchases are being run through. If a clerk is actually unable to see the customers as they stand at the counter, the customers will often wait up to half a minute before following the instructions so tidily displayed before their eyes.
Every day, except weekends, two or more trolleys loaded with brown cardboard boxes come trundling down the wide left aisle and deposit their loads in a small area of cleared carpet near the back, and once a week a very large trolley, a sort of manually operated forklift, rumbles imposingly straight to the back room, stacked six feet high with cardboard cubes containing bargain books.
These boxes stay in the back; the smaller daily loads usually return severally, in twos and threes, to the front, where they are dealt with next to the cash registers. Twice a week, also, boxes stuffed with magazines are trafficked, and once a week, a large, heavy package wrapped in brown paper is pounded onto the floor with the boxes of books: the British magazines. A special method has been developed by one clerk for the unpacking of large boxes of paperbacks: a clipboard is placed over the open top, the works are inverted and the books are unmolded into four or six neat stacks as the cardboard is lifted away.
Not all procedures are so tidy, though, especially if involving a box with an unsealed bottom. More than once, a hapless clerk has found his feet surrounded by heaps of books which have chosen the back way out.
But the sound of falling books is usually met with restrained laughter. There are plenty of falling books to be heard, too, for some demonic designer decided to construe shelves for this store which, while versatile, rest at an acute angle to their backing wall. Gravity thus feeds the bottoms of books into the tight corner formed, and the volumes, no longer being perpendicular to their shelves, lean forward and somersault onto the rug.
More spectacular mishaps are managed by the bargain displays, which are in the form of pyramids: the volumes standing on the top, if unbalanced, will fall onto the next level, and, combining with the books there, will proceed to the next, and so forth, producing an almost-lethal avalanche of reading material.
The closest customers will either guiltily attempt a hurried tidying of the mess, or remove themselves from the scene instantly. And sometimes employees will glance in passing at a dislocated book, but leave it untouched for an hour or more. They almost always have something else to do. The employees may be seen: walking in between two points; encouraging the concise arrangement of their product; on occasion, surrounded by huge stacks of books and looking ruminatively at a bare pyramid, deciding how to build it; or standing, clipboard and pencil in hand, gazing at the shelves, looking for that one book out of the 35, in stock, the existence of which they must verify.
If you approach them, they will be characteristically modestly polite, sometimes quite helpful, sometimes unenthusiastic. Their minds are to the task at hand, liked or hated. And if the till is the responsibility of a clerk, he or she will, at the ring of the bell, post with dispatch to the cash desk.
This is usually the time when customers seem to stop them on their way, requiring some obscure title; the phone seems to ring more often at this point, too.
Things happen in clusters around here. Breaks to the back room are always welcome. In the back room ,which is smaller than your living-room but likely a bit bigger than your bedroom, the manager and assistant manager take up residence among the array of boxes, shelves and heaped books. A desk, a filing cabinet and various necessary papers, messily piled, may also be found.
The clerks who take refuge there from time to time will read, eat, or, more often, swap rude jokes and irreverent insights. Its open or closed state depends on the degree of secrecy desired by those within, on the frequency of traffic in and out of the room at that time, or on the amount of heat accumulated from the large electrical transformer which sits under a makeshift counter.
The back room is the inner sanctum, where marketing secrets are kept, attitudes are let into the open, the odd cigarette is smoked. And it is here, with the door closed, that employees will take cartloads of paperback books, lifted of late from the shelves and the dust puffed away from them, and, bending the card-paper back, will grasp the books in two hands and rip, denuding them of their covers, and consigning glued packets of naked pulp paper by the hundreds to reused boxes, to be taken out to the trash compactor.
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