Overheard amongst the shelves…
Customer: Excuse me, do you have any signed copies of Shakespeare plays?
Me: Er… do you mean signed by the people who performed the play?
Customer: No, I mean signed by William Shakespeare.Customer: I read a book in the Eighties. I don’t remember the author, or the title. But it was green, and it made me laugh. Do you know which one I mean?
Man: Do you have black and white film posters?
Me: Yes, we do, over here.
Man: Do you have any posters of Adolf Hitler?
Me: Pardon?
Man: Adolf Hitler.
Me: Well, he wasn’t a film star, was he.
Man: Yes, he was. He was American. Jewish, I think.
Me: ………..
More from Jen Campbell, a young writer “currently working in bookselling,” in her “Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops.”
As we lower our voices, we might recall that it was on this date in 1962, in his first one-man show (at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles), that Andy Warhol premiered his Campbell’s Soup Can series. It was the debut of Pop Art on the West Coast.
