Search for a book
I’ve been searching for Iraj Pezeshkzad’s My Uncle Napoleon, the novel that made “going to San Francisco” a euphemism for sex in Farsi, for almost a year now. The San Francisco Public Library doesn’t have it, and none of the respectable booksellers with People Who Know About Books at the counters have been able to find it either. I was even sent over to abebooks.com to search the vast network of independent booksellers for the book I want.
So today, on a whim, I entered “Iraj Pezeshkzad” into a form on Amazon.com and poof Amazon says a copy will be shipped out by January second, and even offered me Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood as an upsell.
I remember when knowing about and being able to find slightly obscure items was the mark of a good retail salesperson, when a request for a book that the regular distributors don’t have was a challenge, when a record store in the suburbs would have a person who, when faced with someone buying a Conrad Schnitzler album, would ask if that person would be interested in hearing something by Wolf Sequenza.
Well, too bad. Amazon can have my business. If a computer can do a better job than a humanâa better job than the humans in one of the best cities for booksellersâof finding books, then the book-shop has truly become nothing other than a book-store.