This book by Jen Campbell is very much what it says on the tin: a humourous compilation of zany things that customers have said in the small handful of bookshops whose owners collaborated in the making of this humourous gift-book. I got given this for Christmas (only yesterday) and so hate to be nit-picking so soon, but the majority of these weren't funny. The majority of entries attest, at best, to customers either having a range of toxic views (a handful of racists, a bagful each of xenophobes and homophobes, and a whole lotta sexists) or simply being outright ignorant of what a bookshop actually is or is for (dozens of entries of people who seem to think that a bookshop constitutes the same roles as a library, cafe, creche, general store, or almost infinitely variable helpline services); the more I read, the more I felt that the occasional genuinely amusing entries weren't worth the ever-mounting sense of despair I felt at a society so losing its grasp on literate culture that requests like the ones contained in this book were possible at all. Basically, it entertained me far less than it fuelled my incumbent misanthropy, which at least has a kind of value in that I have always been somewhat put off independent bookshops by their tendency to have very grumpy misanthropes as owners/staff - but now I see why, and if one of the main points of reading is to develop empathy, then I have developed such with a small group of people who I have given lots of money to over the years but struggle to like or understand, but if bookshops truly are plagued by customers coming in and asking things that are bafflingly dim or gobsmackingly rude or both and everything inbetween, then... ugh. Neil Gaiman's commendation on the front calls this book "so funny... so sad" - ditto. I do not recommend this book except as a present to anyone who works in a bookshop themselves, as to read of ludicrous customers whom they themselves have not had to deal with may be vaguely cathartic.
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