A guest post from Marijke
A much more realistic 'day in the life' from my partner in crime
Dearest Readers,
Sometimes I get really bored by the sound of my own voice so I thought for this week I’d bring in my sidekick and fellow little treat lover Marijke to open up the windows - so to speak.
Marijke, as you’ll all know is my store manager and a general legend. She’s been with me since the start of OB when we were working out of my home office and she thought I was a complete weirdo - still does.
Nothing would happen were it not for Marijke keeping me on track. She is the brains behind the operational day to day running of the store and I’m forever grateful that this gives me flexibility to be in Sydney to be with my husband’s family.
Enjoy, sweet ones !
Jessie
x
___________________________________________________________________________
A Day in the Life….of the Open Book Manager
9am: We open our doors which, during June, means assessing the wind and determining if we keep one of our front doors closed. It’s a difficult decision because the store feels less welcoming when our big, heavy door is half closed…but it’s also very cold when the Makuru winds whip through the store bringing a tree’s worth of leaves with them. Soon we’ll even have to resort to turning the heaters on.
An unwelcoming but beautiful door.
9.15am Are we getting coffee? We’re getting coffee. Prior to working at Open Book I wasn’t a regular coffee drinker but now I’ve become someone with a regular, complicated order (dirty soy chai latte for me). We clean everyone’s keep cups and take turns purchasing from Good Things or Simply Beautiful Biscuits (who do an amazing chai latte if you’re curious).
9.30am Now that I’m caffeinated it’s time to look at the plans for the day and make sure everyone has something to work on during the day. Every day is different because we get boxes of stock at different times of the week and in between stock arriving we arrange returns of older stock. Plus refreshing our displays, tidying sections (and practising the alphabet), and of course helping people find their new favourite books! Sometimes a stock delivery will arrive around this time, or we will have piles of lovely new things to find homes for from the previous day’s deliveries.
10am I start re-ordering books that sold the day before. Sounds pretty straightforward but it can involve a bit of cross-checking to make sure we’re ordering the right edition of a book (like when they change from the large, ‘C format’ book to the smaller, ‘B format’) or if we need to order more or less of something.
Actually there’s a nice little tangent (something else that happens a lot in the day): book formats.
When books are first released they arrive in a “C format” or what I call a “large paperback”. When i started in bookselling they were called “trade paperbacks” but that terminology seems to have fallen out of favour. I just did a little Google and apparently there’s no standard size for a C format book!
After an amount of time (12 months? 6 months? It varies from publisher to publisher, although it seems to be getting shorter all the time) the book will then arrive in the “B format” paperback, or more commonly the “A format”. These are my preferred format so I often end up waiting for favourite authors so I can have a matched set in terms of size. The only difference between B and A is the sizing - A formats are what I consider a normal paperback and B formats are slightly larger.
Sometimes publishers will use the format change as a chance to change up the cover design or add some new material to the book (like with the new Fourth Wing paperback - which has two new chapters in it).
On the left, the C format of Demon Copperhead. On the right, the A format.
So when we sell a C format paperback I will check and see if the smaller format has been released and if we need to order that instead. Or if it’s not far off being released I need to decide if we need the C format desperately or if we can wait the few weeks for the new version to arrive.
(Yes, if there’s a hardback edition that basically just adds an extra occurrence of this step - hardback, then C format, then B/A format…but there are also hardcover special editions that come out after the paperback! This seems to be a more common thing recently. I’ve already preordered myself a hardcover copy of ‘The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea’).
Is this too much insider knowledge? Am I giving away my hard earned secrets?
By now it’s probably…
12pm which means lunches, sorting out who is going when and covering the area they work in while they top up on energy. Luckily we have lots of nice options for lunch and a beautiful courtyard to eat it in - at the moment, by the middle of the day it will have warmed up enough that we can enjoy our lunch out of doors.
2pm Is a popular time for a little meeting with a publisher representative, going through all the new releases for the future and determining what we need to have on the shelves. This can be very exciting (finding out about new books before they get here!) and gives us some exciting ‘gossip’ for regular customers (when we see something we know so-and-so will just LOVE) but it can also be very expensive (when I spot $110 Jenny Holzer books that I won’t order for the store to sell, but have to get for myself, obviously).
The other interesting thing about these meetings is seeing the sheer number of titles that are published every month! If you’ve ever come in to the store and gone ‘wow, this is a lot of books’, dare I tell you we only order probably 15-20% of what we get shown every month? Which is why we sometimes run into trouble when people ask for ‘that new release’!
By 3pm I probably need a little snack to get me through the afternoon sugar slump. No second coffee please or I won’t sleep!! This is also when stock MIGHT be delivered which means unpacking, onboarding, double checking to make sure we’ve been sent the right books, removing anything that’s been damaged in transit, contacting people who’s special orders have arrived…
Once we get to about 4.30pm I start doing end-of-day things….checking in with everyone about where they’re at and seeing what needs to be rolled over to the next day, and the practical elements of closing up the store, and often realising I forgot to do something earlier in the day and making sure I add that to my next day’s to-do list (Todoist has been my life saver).
“...for the first time, he knew the stolid, stubborn indifference of the inanimate.”
And finally at 5pm we bring in our signs and close the doors, switch off all the lights (and maybe the heaters) and prepare to go home…time for me to get on the bus and maybe squeeze some reading in. This week’s pick: I Heard the Owl Call My Name, as recommended by the Tartans Book Club who meet once a month in our courtyard. I’m loving this so far but it is requiring a lot of focus - as the introduction talks about, the writing leaves it to you to figure out what is happening on a deeper level.
Left, by day. Right, by night :)
Depending on what day it is I’ll either do some zine-based work, some book-binding work, or go rock climbing. I’m just that cool that my whole life revolves around books! And rocks.
Love from,
Marijke !