Liddachur, neat

I still work from time to time at the l.n.c.b., which happens to be across the bridge from my San Francisco abode. There is also a branch near my work, and I go there at lunch from time to time. Strangely enough, I even buy something there once in a while -- usually just a cup of coffee. Today I was lost, as usual, in the literature/fiction section. Something about all the chick lit books got my dander up.

I went over to the infodesk and shot at the guy standing there: "Who wrote To the Finland Station?"

He had to look it up. "Edmund Wilson," he said cheerfully, enunciating those syllables for the first time in his life. "We might have it in stock," he added, cocking an eye back to his computer screen.

I knew exactly what he was looking at and what that conditional tone meant. The inventory system at the l.n.c.b. is not, unfortunately, updated on the fly when someone buys a book; sometimes the information is two or three days old. So anytime the computer shows that a book is in stock, unless we actually tripped over it less than a few hours ago, employees are supposed to say "It might be in stock."

Still, what were the odds that someone would have bought their one copy of "To the Finland Station" in the last couple of days? I went back to the W section. No dice, though they did have several paperback copies of a Wilson biography. Sighing, I spotted something else nearby, and grabbed that: a new paperback edition of The Collected Short Stories of William Carlos Williams.