Valerie Martin & her
daughter Adrienne
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"Customer Satisfaction" and "Service
with a Smile" are high priorities in the Maple Street Book
Shop Handbook (a.k.a. So You’ve Always Wanted to Work in
a Book Shop?!). There were, however, limits. Several customers
were trying to check out and had questions, but one particular
visitor was belligerently persistent in demanding a thorough
synopsis of every single book displayed around the front desk.
Finally, one of the employees, in an attempt to stop the harassing
interrogation, announced coolly, "Oh, we don’t read
the books. We just sell them."
VALERIE MARTIN, Rome, Italy, novelist whose works include
Mary Reilly and The Great Divorce
In the fall of 1979, shortly after I returned
to New Orleans from a long stint at New Mexico State University,
Rhoda was kind enough to offer me employment at the Children’s
Book Shop. I was glad to have the job and grateful to Rhoda
(to this day) for hiring me because I would have been completely
broke without it. I’m afraid I wasn't a very adept bookseller.
I was particularly hopeless at balancing out the cash register
at the end of the day.
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I found this relatively simple task so difficult that I have since
repressed all memory of how it was accomplished. I think I never
got my figures to come out exactly in my entire time there.
In spite of my general incompetence and the
crisis of conscience I suffered every time I sold a ten-year-old
a copy of Judy Blume’s Forever, those months were pleasant,
nearly serene. My daughter Adrienne was four and she spent her mornings
at the Newcomb nursery, only a few blocks away. On my lunch break,
I walked over to meet her and she came back with me to pass the
afternoon lounging on the floor or swinging on the front porch.
After we closed up, we went back to our apartment on my bicycle.
I am a great lover of routine and this was a good one. I wrote much
of my novel A Recent Martyr during that time. Fortunately,
I didn’t know then that it would take eight years to find a
publisher for that book.
During my tenure at Maple Street, Anne Rice came
to New Orleans from San Francisco on a book tour for her novel Feast
of All Saints. She did a signing for Rhoda, and somehow I got
a free signed copy of the book. While the party was going on, I
wandered out to the street to see the limo she was traveling in,
presumably by her publishers. Can my memory be correct? I believe
it was a blood-red Cadillac with the initials "A.R." in
a kind of crest on the side. Other friends have told me they remember
the car, but no one seems to recall the detail of the elegant initials.
Perhaps they only appeared in a dream I had later. Or, more likely,
as so often happens, I had a vision of the future.
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