Last summer in the Singapore Airport:
Me: Would you call me bookish?
My Boyfriend: I believe I already have called you bookish.
Me: Laughter. Oh. Right.
My Boyfriend: Even though I believe that you would rather be in the company of books than in the company of people, I still think you have decent social skills.
Me: More laughter. Thanks. [I guess]
Today I went to the annual Fort Mason book sale in San Francisco. I went there expecting to be enraptured by all the books.
Instead I found I was more interested in the people. A true lover of people watching, this place was a visual feast for me.
Fort Mason Book Sale in San Francisco
The first thing I noticed at the Fort Mason book sale was that around every section there hovered a cluster of similar-looking people who epitomized their chosen genre.
Crowded around the Natural and Physical Sciences section were the hippies. Lingering over the Art section were the eccentric types.
Perusing the Rare and Collectors section–which, by the way, was guarded by a 300-pound bodybuilder in a “STAFF” t-shirt who was working diligently to keep out the rowdy mob of bookish hooligans ready to beat down the antiqued plywood shelving to get at their prized Encyclopedia Britannica–were the silver foxes with their smoking jackets and bifocals.
The only section at the Fort Mason book sale I couldn’t quite figure out was the Business section.
The people around the table ranged from a homeless man with a sleeping bag nestled among the books in his shopping cart to an artsy twenty-something who looked like she had never actually seen the inside of an office.
There was also an old hippie with shifty eyes who was trying to figure out how to set fire to the Business section without causing smoke damage to the neighboring New Age section (the placement of which was unmistakably planned by the Establishment).
I walked around a bit more and found my way to the Fiction – Foreign Language (European) section. The books were carefully laid out so that next to a Spanish copy of The Time Traveler’s Wife I could find a Russian copy of War and Peace.
It was next to a six-volume leather-bound German-English encyclopedia and a French book by Baudelaire.
After wading through several Swedish-English dictionaries, mistaking a book called 1001 Pitfalls in German for 1001 Paellas in German (a title most definitely reserved for a book sale!) and a thousand copies of every Danielle Steel novel in every language imaginable, I moved over to the Political Science section.
The Political Science section was a little less amusing. Between the 8,000 books on the Cuban Missile Crisis–every political scientist’s favorite subject. I’m not kidding. In college I could write “Cuban Missile Crisis” as my answer to every test question in my International Relations classes and get ¾ credit just because it warmed the heart of anyone grading it–and every copy of every book Ann Coulter has ever written (marked at a DEEP discount, of course. This is San Francisco we’re talking about here), I found little of interest.
My favorite area was the Fiction (Hardcover) / Fiction (Paperback) section, not so much because fiction is my favorite genre, but because it attracted the most amusing group of people.
Before I could observe them properly, though, at least half a dozen people ran me down with their shopping carts.
So engrossed were they in their search for that out-of-print Tom Clancy thriller that they didn’t even notice me standing right in front of them. Sigh.
I tended to my contusions and looked down to find a book with my last name as the title. Intrigued and smugly delighted, I picked it up and read the inside of the jacket.
Sadly, the book was not about a person who shared my last name. In fact, my last name wasn’t even the last name of one of the characters. It was that of a prison. Naturally.
I put down the book and moved along, dodging carts with the deft ability possessed only by the bookish and NFL running backs.
A minute later, a woman came up and asked me and another woman if either of us had seen a stray copy of Water for Elephants.
Before I could respond, the other woman said “I have it at home, but I haven’t seen it here.” Wow. I didn’t know this was a book sale and a pissing contest.
I made a mental note to boast about my own personal library if ever asked if I had seen a novel I owned lying around.
A few rows down I overheard a man yelling to his friend: “Where are you going? Literature? Oh, I don’t do that stuff. I’m going to Cooking.”
He caught me laughing at him and gave me the cold stare he reserves expressly for those who want to buy literature (vile creation!) at a book sale (imbeciles!).
I kept walking until I came across a New Age-looking man who was diligently scanning every single book in the Fiction (Hardcover) section into his PalmPilot. Ah, the book arbitrageur! A staple at any good book sale.
I looked to my right and saw that in the corner there was a concession stand set up. This wasn’t your usual Barnes-and-Noble-style Starbucks, though.
This was your regular street-carnival-style concession stand, complete with buttered popcorn and hot dogs (don’t spill mustard on the book before you buy it, please!). I was thoroughly amused.
I left the Fort Mason book sale in San Francisco empty handed since I didn’t want to accumulate more books right before moving to London. It was sad not to buy anything, but the experience itself was well worth the visit.
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