These Difficult Times

I’d like to share with you an interesting experience I had on the downtown IRT express train this morning.

Yeah, I’ll admit it. I’m a biblio-voyeur. I’m nosy when it comes to what books and magazines people read on the subways. Well, there sat a woman reading quietly on the train, and I immediately noted that she seemed much more involved in her book than most readers seem to be, so I peered down to see what she was reading, and, sure enough, it was the paperback version of “Working With You Is Killing Me.”

I thought to myself, hmh! I know a thing or two about this book. I looked at her again, and I could see she was reading voraciously—Whoa!—and that she was weally diving into it, and that she had just started it.

Normally when strangers are reading, I leave them alone, but since I knew this book back-to-front, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to bother her about it, so I begged her pardon and asked if I could interrupt her to ask a few questions.

“Excuse me, but I’m familiar with this book and an acquaintance of the authors, and I’m curious, where did you see this book? I mean, how did you find out about it?”

She immediately smiled at me in an un-NewYorkery way and said “Oh, from these,” and she pointed toward the overhead subway car advertisements.”I saw the ad and, you know, it kinda just grabbed me. This title, it’s just so—you know, it’s perfect.”

“Wow, “ I nodded, “it does do that.” I told her I liked this book a lot right off the bat too.

“You know,” she said, “I went to three different bookstores before I found it. It’s out of stock everywhere.”

“You went to three different stores to get this book?”

“Yeah, I went all over the place—to a Borders in Westchester, and two Barnes & Nobles, but I found it. The clerk said I was the third person to ask about it that day.”

This amazed me. There aren’t many books these days that impel readers to travel so far out of their way to find a book.

“It really got me,” she continued, “ you know, the stuff about bad bosses. Ugh, I have the worst boss, total micro-manager. It’s awful.”

“Sorry. Yeah, I know the type. Well,” pointing at the book, “I hope you enjoy it. I found it to be an extremely useful thing to read.”

I handed her my business card and told her if she liked this book, she might also like my website, and we shook hands and parted ways.

Kind of random, eh? But that’s New York for ya!

What This Means

This interaction answers a question that I’ve been wondering about for a little while: Do books still matter? And if so, how much, what with Hollywood, the internet, MTV, massive multiplayer online games, and the sixty bazillion cable channels available to distract us. Don’t we have enough stimulation?

I have come to believe that—far beyond the shadow of any doubt—books still retain an incredible magnitude of cultural, social, and intellectual power. That power may be overshadowed by the enormous appeal of all these other available options, but I can’t think of many other $10 purchases that a person would go such lengths to get. This nice woman behaved as though this book was more than a book, as though she was buying a complex computer system, or seeking a good medical surgeon—that’s the level of mental exertion she put into finding this book. What does this mean? That some books, many books, are still an incredible value, even for ten bucks, and that customers are willing to go to incredible distances to buy the ones that help them overcome difficulties, and that they remain the central delivery system for complex conceptual tools that readers lack and crave.

Take that, cable companies!