Games people don't play

It may not have escaped the attention of those of you possessing antennae tuned to popular culture that there exists a phenomenon called FIFA Manager.  For those not so calibrated, let me inform you that this is a series of electronic games which have modelled and reproduced the experience of managing a football team, and that such is the level of detail and accuracy that has been accreted to the product as the years have passed, that it is now possible to incur several forms of stress-related illness while playing the game, all of which are recognised by the medical establishment as legitimate reasons for being unable to work and receiving full sick pay.

This has naturally caused me to puzzle over why, among the plethora of scenarios and settings against which console games are placed, the world of publishing and books is not present.  Where is Librarian's Creed IV, for example, or Grand Copyright Theft VI (in which a band of plucky literary agents plunge themselves into the murky and dangerous underworld of pirated texts).  My latest cast-iron, guaranteed fortune-earner, is, therefore, Independent Bookshop Manager (I), soon to be available on the Y-Cube, Joy Platform and in many other formats.  Among other features, the game will:

• Allocate you a budget to divide between overheads, stock and staff - (do you pay out big money for the brilliant but unpredictable Senior Bookseller who will either earn you a fortune with their mercurial sales technique and encyclopedic literary knowledge, or will alienate your customers by staring haughtily at anyone who asks for insufficiently- challenging books?)

• Present you with tantalisingly fiendish puzzles - (can you solve The Christmas Rota without causing most of your staff to feel disaffected and exploited; is your mind prepared for balancing reductions from the recommended retail price against gross profit margins?)

• Require you to predict the surprise seasonal best-sellers - (will it be the autobiography of the three-legged juggling cat, or the compendium of obscure facts about medieval armour-polishing?  The wrong choice could see sales plummet and the January sale tables tortured by tottering piles of un-returnable, ruinously-reduced stock)

Also featured will be pseudo-randomly-generated events, which will challenge your mental agility and literary awareness:

• A local author arrives unannounced offering stock of their books - are they a nuisance peddling a badly-photocopied and stapled guide to their own kitchen, or do they offer an undiscovered jewel of local history?

• Thanks to an obscure satellite TV channel, Macrame suddenly seizes hold of the popular imagination: do you order in every book you can obtain on the subject, at minimal discount from obscure publishers, or decide it's a temporary phenomenon and remain loyal to baking?

All this and more, including a special Battle Extension Module, in which you go to war against a new branch of a national chain, will enable the feeling that YOU are at the helm of that glorious but precarious vessel that is The Independent Bookshop.

***** Special offer on pre-orders for Christmas 2014 *****

Do not go gentle into those good shelves

Herein are found further meandering remarks occasioned by the delightful experience of being a born-again bookseller in The Bookshop, Welwyn Garden City, (winner of the Doughty Tradespersons' Least Deceptively-Named Retail Outlet Award, 2011) (yes, there was a statuette).

The Shredded Wheat Factory; from Audrey  Bassingthorpe's Book:
Buildings of Welwyn Garden that are not  The Bookshop

There has been a certain amount of shuffling and creating of sections within our word emporium, with one of my intrepid colleagues causing to exist - by means of arcane ritual, esoteric incantations and - most importantly, a good, sturdy trolley - a Dark Romance department within Horror.  Unfortunately, because of a delay to the re-supply of our blank shelf labels (which has transcended epic proportions), we are unable to indicate this new area overtly, so we have drafted a new rota ensuring each of us in turn stands near the appropriate area looking pale and sensitive, with a faint aura of supernatural menace.  I dare not tell you how we're flagging up the new Erotica section.

Booksellers tend to have favourite sections within shops, (usually, but not always determined by personal interest) and the bond that subsequently develops is usually of a fiercely parental nature; a mixture of unconditional love, concern and jealousy whenever a threat to the size or position of the section is perceived, or - in pathological cases - whenever another bookseller attempts to shelve some stock in it, tidy it up or even approach within fifty yards of it.  An amusing consequence of this custodial relationship is the inappropriate championing of books to customers. When you hear a phrase such as:

'Yes, Sir or Madam, that 4-volume Oxford Latin Dictionary would be a perfect christening present...it's never too early....'

you know that someone has become a little too keen to boost the Language department takings.

Conversely and, so to speak, on the other hand, I have known booksellers who would tremble with apprehension when they were required to enter certain subject territories, the usual suspect here being 'Mind, Body, Spirit' or - as its known by its less spiritually-inclined detractors - the Miscellaneous Books Section.  This fear tended to be based on the difficulty of organising and therefore navigating the section (arranging it in ascending order of strangeness, for example, seldom works well) and of the subjects contained therein.  Often this led to the pitiful scenario of the bookseller who ran MBS being dragged out of their tea break by a whimpering colleague who would be told by the former, not for the first time, that 

'Astral Phenomena comes straight after Alien Encounters; it's obvious, for goodness' sake'.

My own spookiest experience in this category occurred many years ago when I telephoned an esoteric publisher to enquire for a customer about the availability of a certain title.  I was informed that the person who dealt with that particular series would be out of the office for some time.  There then followed an unconventionally long pause, which terminated in the revelation:

'He is a student of the Fourth Way'.

I confess, dear reader, that I was too discomfited to ascertain if and how these two statements were related.