B-I-N-G-O! The Game of Things Booksellers Hear Daily / Elizabeth Bluemle. In: Publishers Weekly August 20th 2018

A couple of years ago, one of our customers brought us a homemade BINGO board. Instead of numbers, each square was filled with funny things she imagined we might encounter—with customers, co-workers, technology glitches, etc.—during the crazy holiday season. It was an inspired idea, and we did a little adding and tweaking to create the BINGO board we shared here in a 2016 PW ShelfTalker blog post.
Recently, bookseller Bob Lingle (recent new owner of Off the Beaten Path Bookstore in Lakewood, N.Y.) posed a kindred question in a private booksellers’ Facebook group. “I think it would be a fun activity to do a ‘Bookseller Bingo,’ he said, “for phrases you hear or questions you’re asked. Any thoughts on what the spaces could be?”
He named a few of his own, and thus began a conversation that drew in more than 50 booksellers with a couple hundred comments. It was gratifying and hilarious and relieving to know that other colleagues share our experiences of the many odd, funny, and sometimes annoying things people say to booksellers on a regular basis. I thought ShelfTalker readers might enjoy a peek into the back room, as it were, so I asked folks if I might share some of their responses. They said yes (hooray!). Readers, welcome to life behind our sometimes-cluttered counters.
Note: These were insider conversations, a safe place to vent, so of course we all shared our “worst of” examples. Please forgive the occasional cranky comments; we do love and appreciate our customers, and this week my ShelfTalker colleagues are all writing on the theme of funny / cute / interesting collections of things we encounter at our stores. Check back in all week long!
At the end of the post is a list of all of the bookseller contributors.
Our BINGO categories:

Heard at Bookstores Daily:

• “Have you read all these books?”
• “I don’t remember the author or title, but it has a blue cover.” (We don’t know why, but the cover is always blue.) Common variant: “I saw a book here a couple of years ago, I don’t remember what it was, but it was in the window. Do you still have that?”
• To used booksellers: “Do you BUY books?” “Do people donate all these to you?”
• “Got any books?!” (Followed by uproarious laughter.)
• “What’s your favorite book?” (This is an impossible question for a bookseller to answer, but if you narrow it down to ‘this week’ or ‘today,’ we might be able to give you an answer.)
• “You don’t carry [x] book. You should.” (Book is actually a store staple and was on the shelf until a half hour earlier, when the last copy was sold, and is already on re-order.)
• “How long have you been here?” (always to bookstores with decade-long tenures or more)
•  “It must be nice to get paid to read all day.” (Um, it really would be nice! If it ever happened in the history of bookselling….) ... [mehr] http://blogs.publishersweekly.com/blogs/shelftalker/