Last night, I was running a bit early to meet a friend for dinner, so stopped by the local Pegasus bookstore to look around. I did some nice looking and then decided that if they had this pretty little Penguin version of The Secret Garden, I would buy it:
(Also, why on earth can I only locate this book to buy from Anthropologie and not from Amazon or Penguin?)
I asked the bookstore guy if they happened to have the special pretty Penguin books and he said that they had some of them and showed me a spot where they could be. Then he asked which one I wanted, so we went looking in the young adult section. And then he went looking up information in his computer and to see when it was coming out and generally went to a lot of trouble to see what he could see about this book.
In retrospect, I can now see that the trouble was that this isn’t actually a book, but a bit of decorative fluff from Anthropologie.
But after all the trouble he went to, I figured that I ought to buy some book and sauntered over to the new fiction releases.
There weren’t any titles that I knew I was jonesing to have, so I was basing my selection on the color of the spine, because, well…
I’m likely to read the book no matter what and when I’m finished, a colored-spine book can add to my rainbow ordered book collection.
So I picked out some book with a nice red spine and took it up to the counter.
And then the very helpful bookstore guy tells me that they have copies of this book from the UK print edition and they’re half as much. “I’ll get one for you!”
The UK edition has a black spine.
I could say “Actually, I’d like to buy this same book for twice as much money, please!”
But that would be crazy, right? So I say nothing, and buy the black-spined version.
Consequently, I’m now reading a novel that I knew nothing about, hadn’t even read the blurb on the back of, and has a black spine.
margaret edith 