We arranged that I would return the next day, posing sometimes as a browser, sometimes as a volunteer clerk. My first customer was a woman in her fifties who said: “I’m looking for a book.”
“What specific book?” I asked.
“The author’s name begins with A or Z and it has a blue cover – and ‘City’ in the title.”
Miraculously we found it, although the author’s name began with M, the cover was red and the title was “Mendacity.”
Later, a short, dark-complexioned man entered. Jo introduced us: he was Mills.
“Ah,” he said, delighted, “you’ve sold all my books.”
“No,” Jo told him, “they were stolen.”
“Well, it’s good to know that people want my poetry enough to steal it. I have more in the car.”
After he left, I said to Jo: “He doesn’t look like a poet.”
“What does a poet look like?” Jo asked.
During one of our customerless lulls, I leafed through Mills’s book. He wrote about the usual subjects –trees, grass, flowers, the sky, the sun, the wind – and in old-fashioned rhyme and metre. If I had had him as a student, I would have given him a C… if I were in a good mood.
After two days, I had discovered nothing. I had sold a few books, but none of them Mills’s. A while after his next visit, his books were gone again. Obviously a customer was stealing them, but which one? The Margaret Atwood fan? The man who collected biographies of Napoleon? The woman who brought children’s books for her granddaughter? The scholar vainly searching for a biography of Colley Cibber?
The next day Mills returned and eagerly replaced the stolen books. I wanted to solve the case and quickly because I had seen a number of titles I wanted and my willpower was weakening.
Soon after his next visit, more of Mills’s books had disappeared. I suggested as an advertising slogan, “Poetry to steal for,” but Jo and Win rejected it, perhaps for reasons of common sense.
I was dusting shelves during Mills’s next visit. I watched him carefully but surreptitiously. He looked around, then quickly grabbed the pile of his books from the counter and slipped them under his sweater.
“So you’re the thief, but why are you stealing your own books?”
“Sales have been disappointing.” he said with extreme understatement. “I thought that if people believed they were being stolen, they’d be more eager to buy them.”
I called Jo and Win and explained the thefts. “Gar, I’m ashamed of you,” said Jo.
“So am I,” said Gar, but I didn’t know if he felt badly about the stealing, or only being caught.
Now the stores keep his books under the counter and they are selling as well, or badly, as ever.
I’ve been tempted to self-publish a volume of my own verse and put it into stores, but I decided that bookstores can handle only so much bad poetry.
