Tuesday, February 4, 2014

You can't sell from an empty wagon!

Marash Girl, as many of you are aware, is the sole proprietor of the on-line bookstore, OldCornerBooks.com, selling books of all kinds and conditions to customers all over the world.  Quite an interesting and fun business, she thinks; fun, that is, if you love books (as she has over 50,000 books in her warehouse, 35,000 of them already listed online)!  Much of her workday is taken up by her listing her out-of-print inventory on line, detailing not only title, author, year of publication, edition, and printing, but also describing as exactly as possible the condition of the book -- its dust jacket (if it has one), its covers, its pages.  Her cousin once asked her how she could tolerate such detail in listing books online; the answer is in an old Armenian saying, "Kich mu sirem  . . .   գիչ մը սիրէմ… "  If you truly love something, an object a person, the time spent in touching it, looking at it, describing it, loving it a bit, is not considered time spent working . . . so that may be the answer.  But it all calls to mind Marash Girl's father (who, many years ago, was the proprietor of Newtonville Electrical Co., Inc, Newtonville, Massachusetts, and before that --  before the Genocide of the Armenians --  spent his childhood in the streets of Marash, Ottoman Empire, where much of that which was sold, was sold from wagons coming into the city from the countryside). His advice of many years ago:  "Just list 10 books a day," he said; "after all, you can't sell from an empty wagon!"

So if Marash Girl has been in business for over 20 years, how many books has she listed, all told?  A free book to whoever guesses the right answer!

5 comments:

  1. If you listened to the old sage, and followed his advice with yogic religiosity, you could have listed about 73,000 books, But my guess would be 54,321.

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  2. Any more guesses before I award the prize to the winner tomorrow?

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  3. if sprezzatura wins, i will cry foul, most fowl.

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  4. My guess is that you did half of what your father said: 5 books a day for 20 years = 365x100=36,500

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