#bookshop stuff

[a-suspicious-lack-of-bagel]

Fun times at the bookshop: Doing shelving, I realised we have 4 different ISBNs of this book:

Australian paperback (6th and 13th editions)

UK paperback

US hardcover

US paperback

And confusingly (for shelving); 13AUPB and 1UKPB list the authors in the opposite order! (As does the sequel).

New shelving policy: Alphabetical by surname of first author, as listed on the earliest edition in stock. All editions of the same title grouped together, but not all titles in the same series; editions sorted by date of first publication in that country then edition number.

[a-suspicious-lack-of-bagel]

Seriously, you'd think that A BOOK INDUSTRY of all people would have a consistent, easy-to-find style guide for title case. Argh.

After checking on the websites of the Booksellers' Association, Publishers' Association, the 3 major publishers, and the Libraries and Information Association; nowhere could I find specific guidelines for title case. I ended up digging through the submission guidelines for the Journal of the ALIA (librarians, see above) - given they prefer APA referencing, I went with APA title case.

It's all very well for ONIX to specify "the full text of the distinctive title of the item, without abbreviation or abridgement; generally taken from the title page". And sure, if the book's in a script with capital letters I'll respect that. But how the heck are you supposed to capitalise the translated title of a book, where the original script doesn't have capitals??

[a-suspicious-lack-of-bagel]

I'm currently at work and for various reasons, large customers (mostly libraries and schools) tend to order by email, liase with us on the book list, and then once the final list of books is confirmed they pay us.

However, from the look of my inbox (and the absence of a large order on our website); today marks the first time that a large customer has paid for their books BEFORE TELLING ME WHICH BOOKS THEY WANT TO BUY.

Anyways, about to send the most confused email of my professional life

[a-suspicious-lack-of-bagel]

do any of you sometimes open a book and just enjoy the smell of the paper for a bit? i'm currently unwrapping some Arabic comics that smell SO GOOD

[a-suspicious-lack-of-bagel]

today's chaos at work: one of our compactuses apparently! has a whole bunch of gaps in the top of it! which means that in some areas, it is Significantly less water-resistant than the ikea bookshelves i have at home.

Unfortunately, we got it precisely to be water and dust resistant! And one of the places it happens to have a hole is both right under a leak in the ceiling and right above our collection of Farsi picture books.

And we only discovered this because someone tried to buy one of the damaged books! So now I have to grovel (only slightly cos the customer is a friend of the store) and find them a (ideally similar) replacement book. And also we just lost $500 worth of books. And I found this mess out approximately 3 minutes before I was planning to leave work this afternoon.

All in all it's been a fun experience (sarcasm).