Our Town's Bookseller

Our Town's Bookseller
A Koan
Fiction
Edward W Pritchard

The local river had overflowed it's banks as rivers often do from time to time and the people in the area had again forgotten that it could happen, which was forgivable because the last major flood had been over 125 years ago.

The bookseller's shop was east of the river, and a previous minor inconvenience of a steep sloping incline of the Main street as it ran away from the River and approached the College now was saving the booksellers shop from the flood waters.

Although a freethinker and an intellectual, the bookseller was a booster of local business, even paying to be in a couple of civic and business organizations that he personally got little economic benefit from. The bookseller was now willing to do his part to fight the flood waters, even while his shop would be safe from the dangers.

Already the Law office and the Library, which in normal times were a couple hundred feet above the River, and protected by a massive cement wall, were now beginning to flood due to water seepage at their foundations. A plan had been developed to save the Library, law office, and most importantly to some, the 20 or more restaurants and bars that catered to the College crowd, and was the life blood of the business community just before the crucial spring break season, that it now was.

This morning in the local paper there had been a discussion of the situation and many elderly people were sure they personally could remember the last flood, and even recalled when the waters were higher. A professor at the college had shown through his previous research how local Indian tribes had admonished early settlers from settlement within half a mile of the River, and warned them not to put their Watermills on the river but at least a half mile away from it, because although infrequent the floods were often brutal. A plan had been developed to save the downtown, and the Editor of the Paper, not an alarmist, and well respected. had capped off the articles with a call for personal sacrifice and support of the proposed plan to save the downtown.

The plan called for sandbags along a strategic location in the path of the waters to support the massive cement wall, and the Army Corps of Engineer agreed to provide consulting assistance. As he finished reading the local paper, the bookseller was not surprised to see several local business boosters entering his shop who asked him to donate books to shore up the sandbags. Sandbags were in short supply locally because of a building boom at the University> More importantly, the army engineers, had refused to allow trucks into the downtown streets because of hidden damage from water seepage. The bookseller, the Library and the Law Office were being asked to donate 1000 books each as the best available material to supplement the available sandbags.

The bookseller had acquired his collection of about 8000 books, carefully, through daily trading and bartering with local sellers. His collection was eclectic and remarkable for such a small town, even one containing a major University, His bread and butter, what justified him sitting in the small shop for 10 to 12 hours a day, was the sale of Romance Novels that he took in trade for credit from readers of that genre of stories, who used the credit to buy more of the same. Through diligent merchandising the bookseller was able to net about $2.00 per book on the romance novels which paid his bills and his salary and allowed him to stock the histories, philosophies, and great works of literature which were less in demand, and carried low sales margins; but were what made the shop unique for such a small town.

The bookseller's dilemma once he decided to cooperate in the plan to save the downtown by donating the 1000 books that was asked for from him to supplement the sandbags was whether to donate the common romance novels or the rarer works of literature. Unlike some others in the book selling business, and even though he was a connoisseur of fine books, the bookseller was able to see his inventory as just that, inventory, and he was not obsessive about collecting books per-se; as they were neither wealth nor treasure to him, but merely a means to run his business.

As the bookseller looked down the street toward the Savings and Loan, he noticed that it too might be soon flooded and decided at that instant to donate the thousand books by size, that is by physically larger weight and volume, regardless of subject matter.