Search for a book

by Posted on

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 human—a bet­ter job than the humans in one of the best cities for booksellers—of find­ing books, then the book-shop has tru­ly become noth­ing oth­er than a book-store.

Lies—Stab­bing Westward

Published by splicer

4 Replies to “Search for a book”

  2. No, I used the SFPL’s search
    No, I used the SFPL’s search func­tion of their elec­tron­ic card cat­a­logue. That tells me of there’s any­thing in any of the San Fran­cis­co branch­es, but noth­ing out­side SF.

    How do I find out if it’s avail­able in anoth­er city? (With­out check­ing each city indi­vid­u­al­ly, that is)

    The frus­trat­ing thing is that the trans­la­tion I ordered is only four or five years old; I can’t imag­ine that the Peo­ple Who Know About Books at SF’s snot­ti­est book­sellers actu­al­ly tried very hard to find it for me.

  3. To get a book through
    To get a book through inter­li­brary loan, you need to talk to a librar­i­an. They’ll have some form for you to fill out (i.e. title, author, and any oth­er info you know) and they might charge a small fee. In Berke­ley it’s $2, in Oak­land it’s 50 cents, but I don’t know what it is in SF. Then the ILL librar­i­an scours all the libraries in the world to find your book and have them ship to them. When it comes in, your local library will con­tact you to let you know it has arrived. Then you can go bor­row it from the library. The draw­back to this is that you have to wait for the library that owns the book to ship it to your library. But the turn around time is gen­er­al­ly rea­son­able, pro­vid­ed that you don’t need the book that very day. Also, by request­ing it, the col­lec­tions devel­op­ment librar­i­an can see that peo­ple want that book and may end up pur­chas­ing it for the collection.

    Librar­i­ans are very help­ful in try­ing to track down a book you’re look­ing for. You can even play the I‑don’t-remem­ber-the-title-or-author-but-it’s-about-this game with them. They’ll try their darn­d­est to get you what you’re look­ing for. At least they are sup­posed to; that’s their job. (The librar­i­an’s job, that is. Not the the library assistant’s.)

  4. Since when is San Fran­cis­co
    Since when is San Fran­cis­co one of the best cities for booksellers?

    I know of one good non-chain store in that town, Green Apple.

    For the 14 years that I lived there, it was always a source of great amaze­ment to me that a city with such a pop­u­la­tion of artis­tic intel­lec­tu­al peo­ple would have such a shit­ty com­ple­ment of bookstores.

    Can’t be blamed on the rise of the mega­s­tores, either, because it goes back to before that.

    Maybe it’s like the may­or thing. S.F. is a won­der­ful city packed with polit­i­cal­ly-aware lib­er­als, for­ev­er doomed to have shit­ty mayors.

    How’s the new guy, New­som, is it?

Leave a Reply