"Look, Drew, she found a copy of the The Tolkien Reader that's only a dollar," the woman behind the counter exclaimed. "What were you doing, settling for a two-dollar copy?"
The customer who had been in front of me excused himself, explaining that his copy of the Reader had an additional story in it. The proprietress beamed at me and shook my hand. "I don't think I've seen you in here before. My name's Edie."
She slowly sorted through the books I had piled onto the counter, giving a friendly commentary on each one -- "Georgette Heyer? You have good taste! Have you read any of her other books? Drew, have you read any Heyer? You must! I put it off for years and have had to spend the last decade apologizing to my friends for not following their recommendations sooner, just because she's a romance author--"
She's a romance author in most stores, anyway. At
Hole in the Wall Books, she's unapologetically shelved in the Classics section. I wholeheartedly approve, even though I might have missed her if I hadn't lingered for that second pass over the Classics, not wanting to interrupt the intense political debate going on around the cash register between Edie, a Defense Department employee, a staunchly pacifist grad student, and a half-dozen other customers whom Edie was on a first-named basis with. It was twenty minutes past closing by the time that I ventured up to the counter, but I was there another twenty minutes, discussing Inklings, the Regency period, economics, and the difficulty of shelving foreign-language maps with Edie and the hapless Drew, who was undergoing an ongoing scold for his failure to read Austen. (Library of Congress employees are not allowed to go through life without reading Pride and Prejudice -- if they know Edie, anyway.)
"You'll be back, won't you?" I explained that I'd certainly come back the next time I had access to a car, but that I was usually just a minion of public transit. This distressed Edie. "The subway's only about ten blocks from here! Here, I'll draw you a map. Now, if you turn at eighth -- or maybe it's seventh -- Drew, do you have your car tonight? He can show you how to get there from here ..."
Drew suggested mildly that I would probably find it easier to take a bus than to
walk ten suburban blocks each way, and I reassured her that I was well capable of looking up bus schedules. A bus on top of a train is too much of a pain to bother with for a bookstore of unknown worth, but for a bookstore that had a copy of the original Sorcery and Cecelia, complete with the
dreadful paperback cover that I remember so fondly from my high school library and the in-jokes that were cut out of the reprint -- I'll be back.