The Book Nobody Would Buy

There is a book that has lived in my front window for eleven months, and I have decided to tell its story before I lose my nerve and mark it down.

It's a big handsome thing. A coffee-table book about lighthouses—photographs, mostly, the kind of book that is more furniture than reading. It came in a lot I bought at an estate sale over in Knox Harbor, and when I unpacked it I thought, well, that one sells itself. Lighthouses. Maine. Big glossy pictures. Put it in the window and stand back.

I put it in the window. I stood back. I am still standing back. Eleven months.

The trouble is that everyone admires it and no one buys it. This is the worst category of book, worse than the books nobody looks at, because at least those you can shelve and forget. This one performs. People stop on the sidewalk. They point. They come in specifically to look at it, they turn the pages with the reverence you'd give a hymnal, they say "oh, isn't that lovely," they show it to whoever they came in with, and then they set it down, gently, like it's a sleeping baby, and they buy a paperback and leave.

I have watched this happen perhaps forty times. The book is beloved. The book is a local celebrity. The book is unsellable.

Sarah thinks it's the price, and marked it down once when I wasn't looking, and it didn't sell any faster, so we marked it back up out of spite. Theo, who has opinions about everything and buys nothing, said the problem is that a book like that is a gift, and nobody in this town has anybody fancy enough to give it to, which is either an insult to Oakridge Harbor or the truest thing anyone's said about it, I can't decide.

I've grown fond of it, is the problem. That's the real trouble. Somewhere in month four it stopped being inventory and started being a fixture, like the out-of-reach light bulb used to be, part of the geography of the store. Reagan sleeps in the patch of afternoon sun that falls right in front of it. Regulars ask after it—"still got your lighthouses?"—like it's a slow-recovering relative. Mrs. Lessard has opinions about which lighthouse should have been on the cover. It has become a member of the community. It attends. It contributes nothing and everyone loves it, like Theo.

Here's the thing I haven't admitted to Sarah. I don't want it to sell anymore.

I mean, I do—it's taking up prime window real estate, and a bookseller who falls in love with her own stock is a bookseller heading for the poorhouse, everyone knows that, my accountant would weep. But some quiet part of me has started to hope that whoever finally buys it will be worthy of it. That it won't just go off in a bag to become a coffee-table book in some house I'll never see. That it'll go to somebody who deserves the lighthouses.

Which is insane. It's a book. Books are for selling. I run a business, not an orphanage for handsome volumes.

But I caught myself on Friday, when a woman from away picked it up and I saw her check the price and start to reach for her wallet, feeling something drop in my stomach that was not the joy of a sale. And she set it down after all—too heavy for the flight home, she said—and I felt, God help me, relief.

So it stays. For now. My lighthouse book, my beautiful useless celebrity, holding down the window and warming Reagan's sun and giving the whole street something to admire on their way past. I'll sell it eventually. It'll go to the right person, and I'll be glad, and I'll be a little bit sad, and I'll put something else in the window that everyone loves and no one buys, because that's the store, that's the whole store, that's the thing they don't tell you about running a bookshop.

You fall in love with the merchandise. Every time. It's a terrible way to make a living and I wouldn't trade it for anything on earth.