I'm convinced that people who walk into bookstores go into a trance.

Call it hypnotism, meditation, exhaust fumes, whatever. Many people sleepwalk in bookstores.

Over and over again booksellers report they have only to touch a book with intention and someone, in the next hour or the next few days, will sleepwalk over and pull that particular book off the shelf.

Let's say you are working hard in the Biography section. You are shelving new books and pushing around older ones to make room. Maybe you are thinking about paying your PG&E bill, maybe you are subtly hypnotized by the colors, titles, smells, cats, that swirl around the store.

At the same time you are thinking: This book's OK, that one should be returned. This book has a torn jacket, that one is an old friend, and all of a sudden...

You come across a handsome Knopf hardcover published last summer: Eleonora Duse: A Biography by Helen Sheehy. You always wondered about her.

You'd forgotten we had the book. You glanced over it when it first came in last August. Then Eleonora Duse sat on the shelf. Untouched, unread, unloved.

Bemused, you close Eleonora and place her carefully, alphabetically, on the next-to-the-top shelf. You notice that shelf still has a loose pin and one day it's going to give way. You move on. The sun progresses through the heavens.

Later the same afternoon you are working the cash register. You look up, startled. There is that very same book, Eleonora Duse in a customer's hand. She is pulling out a credit card. She wants the book you touched this morning.

If this was the first time you'd be more startled. But it's not the first time. Earlier in your bookselling career you might have chalked this up to luck, kismet, synchronicity, statistics. Not this time. You are beginning to understand that this kind of magic happens sooner or later to everyone who works in a bookstore.

I don't know if this happens to clerks in food stores, librarians in libraries, or sales people on car lots. Maybe it happens there, maybe it doesn't. In bookselling it's an acknowledged phenomenon.

You've got a minute. There's a bookstore. On impulse you walk in off the hot street to a cool, hushed world of wonders. Books of all colors and sizes flash back at you wherever you glance. You almost stumble over your own feet staring at beautiful Queen Farah Pahlavi's face. Last night you saw her on 60 Minutes; this morning she's on the cover of the book at your elbow.

Jazz wafts beguilingly through the air. Busy staffers balancing stacks of books brush by your elbow. A child laughs. A Monarch butterfly circles the ceiling lights. It's heaven. You are in a heaven of books. You are dreaming. You are awake. Whatever.

You wander deeper into the store. You find yourself in front of the biography section. Standing there, wedged between poetry and perpetual calendars, you can feel the heat of a spot light on the top of your head. You look up.

That shelf appears to be just a bit off center. Maybe it's going to fall. Maybe you should step back. The spine of a particular book flicks into your retina. You pull it down. It looks interesting. It has a certain energy to it. Maybe you'll open it.

You still have a couple of minutes. You step over to the window seat and settle in. As you open the book voices murmur, a saxophone stutters. People step carefully so as not to bump your knees. A phone rings.

You've got to get going. You could stay here all day. You could work here. That's it! They need help. You could be a bookseller, surrounded by lovely books and time to read. In the meantime you'll read THIS book.

You hop over to the counter and present your book for purchase. The woman behind the cash register looks at you, at the book, and back at you. For the briefest moment, she smiles.

You hand over your credit card. The book slides into a paper bag. You exit into sunshine and hurtling cars. You have your book, the book you didn't know you wanted.

You're happy. Magic has happened to you.

Aired Sunday March 14, 2004 at 10:55 am and Monday March 15, 2004 at 8:40 am

Orders/Information:

Eleonora Duse: A Biography by Helen Sheehy. Knopf hardcover $32.50. ISBN 0375400176.

From The New Yorker: Eleonora Duse, the turn-of-the-century Italian actress who inspired Stanislavsky's Method, told her company that to play Ibsen's characters they had to know unhappiness, and, if necessary, they should go looking for it. ... Helen Sheehy makes it clear that Duse followed her own advice. Duse was a genius at creating misery for herself; her disastrous affair with the poet Gabriele d'Annunzio must have fed her onstage characterizations of Hedda and Marguerite, just as it gave d'Annunzio material for his novel "Il Fuoco." Duse lived 1858 to 1924.

Our readers/listeners respond:

Thanks, Tony Miksak. I needed to be reminded of the reason I got into the book business in the first place. Wish we had a store like yours in Annapolis instead of the usual B&Ns and Borders. My former assistant, Neely Thrush, has come close. With the help of an SBA loan, she opened a small children's bookshop last year called The Wise Willow. It's my idea of book heaven, with lots of treasures that I missed the first time round and cubbyholes to read them in. I imagine your shop is just as welcoming, and I hope to pay it a visit this summer.

So, thanks for this week's edition of Words On Books and all the others that preceded it.

Best wishes,
Susan Artigiani
Naval Institute Press
Annapolis, Maryland

Tony-

It's very true what you say about books selling after being touched. I noticed this as a customer, and even more as a bookseller. After a lot of thought I've narrowed it down to two possible reasons: pheremones and temperature. Touching a book with intent ALWAYS makes a book more appealing, and those are the only two non-metaphysical reasons I could come up with. Ahhh for the glory days of easy grants; there's a dissertation in there somewhere. Love getting these.

Russ Harvey,
Cody's Books

My friend Judy Schenkofsky who owns the Mendocino Gift Company (with Alice & Steve of course!) sent me your blurb about working in a bookstore and people walking in in a trance. It made me smile. Thanks for that!

I've also noticed that people don't pay attention to what kind of bookstore it is even though you've done everything you know how to tell them. Sigh!

And moving books around even if unintentional works well in mystery bookstores too. Sometimes even thinking "I wish someone would buy that book. I'd hate to send it back!" works as well.!

Thanks for the chuckle. If they only knew that even booksellers don't have enough time to read everything they would like to. Not enough hours in the day. And we don't get to spend all our time sitting around reading. (I usually just sat down to do that when they walked in the door!) But it is a privilege to have as much time to be around books and readers as we do!

Linda Dewberry

Whodunit? Books
301 E. Fourth Avenue
Olympia, WA 98501
360-352-8252