Selling books to the bookshops

There was a big pony show at the Beast Market today - one horse box in the car park had come all the way from Kirkham in Lancashire.

Very slow day in the shop - the only people who came through the door, in the morning at least, either wanted to buy particular fiction books ("I'm looking for The Cruel Sea by Nicholas Monserrat....") or wanted to sell books.
We don't sell any fiction at Marijana's, and I'm not the buyer, so I couldn't even look at their books, even when they'd come all the way from Llandudno specially. It really is worthwhile phoning ahead to make sure there will be someone there to look at your books, if you want to sell them, and that you're going to the right shop with them. The first thing I say when someone comes in to Marijana's with a box or a couple of carrier bags is "Are they travel or language books?" and quite often they're not, and they need to go to another shop which might be interested instead. The second thing I say (or often the other way round) is "I'm sorry, but I'm not the buyer - and I'm afraid you can't leave the books here."
When I worked for the Children's Bookshop we did that once or twice, and we just got into a mess with them - books that Judith was considering had to be left in the shop, and other customers would rummage through them and scatter them round the shop if we didn't keep an eye on them, thinking they were for sale. Or Judith would decide that she didn't want to buy them when she saw them, or only wanted to buy two or three out of a box full, and then had to wait for weeks for the owners of the books to return to pick them up - and sometimes they never did. So we didn't allow any more people to leave their books for sale. Sometimes people were just trying to dump their books on us - didn't even want any money for them - but that meant that we were then left with the problem of disposal of unsaleable books (and I'm talking about books without spines or covers or even, occasionally, mouldy books). If Judith was there, she did the deal straight away, and if she wasn't, then she'd lost the chance to buy whatever books the person had brought in, and they had to try elsewhere.