"It would be both a Crime and Punishment if you don’t let me take you out." 

—Bookstore pickup line you may want to write down

Have you ever seen a sign in a bookstore that read, “Books We Pretend We’ve Read” (which we wrote about here)? When our executive editor, Maya, sent me a pic of this, I thought it was pretty clever. But if I’m being honest, I’m not sure I’d like to be seen buying one of those books. I might instead hold my head down and think, “Walk away fast and pretend you didn’t see it, since I’ve pretended to have read these my entire life. Why start now?”

That being said, I actually don't think it's the worst idea to have brutally honest signs at bookstores. Like, “Booking and Hooking” or maybe a “Single and Mingle” sign over a table of books? (You know, for all the single ladies. Oh, oh, oh,oh, oh, oh, oh, o-ohh. #Beyonce) 

There are many reasons, according to this article titled Love in Bookstores: Browsing customers often circle each other like timid sharks, by Emma Straub, on why bookstores are “the best place to meet, fall in love and even get engaged.” (Which is another reason, you should memorize these lines we fed you so you can pretend you’ve read the classics, especially if you're more of a bar hopper than a book hopper!) 

Even though Straub had no evidence to support this, she had written that bookstores were a great place for picking up finding romance and love. IRL, that is, not in between book covers…but maybe — if you're lucky  in literature — eventually between bed covers. (Or to find a happy ending — of both kinds. If you don’t know what I mean by the other kind of "happy ending,” ask Google, NOT your grandkids!)

“It seemed to me the sort of thing that was probably true, in the same way that I assume good-looking waitresses and bartenders often get phone numbers slipped to them on cocktail napkins,” she writes. 

When she turned from a regular customer to working at a Brooklyn-based bookstore, she witnessed co-workers getting asked out by customers, and vice versa. She also witnessed encounters with both the literary taste of Brooklyn's young book buyers and the writers, describing them as “most likely to be name-dropped by people who don't read very many books but who want to see you without your clothes on.”

At 29, she was already married and not looking, but she admits she sometimes wondered why no colleague or customer ever asked her out. (Just like I sometimes wonder get offended why gay women never hit on me? I know I'm straight, but...seriously! What’s wrong with me?) 

In any case, she admits she probably didn’t “exude the glowing flares of someone who 

would go home with a stranger after a witty conversation about the lesser works of Phillip Roth.” (I say she dodged some bullets with those totally not fun elitists jerks!)

Still, she watched the flirtations occur regularly in the bookstore, seeing “the shy approach, the careful hand-selection of a novel or a volume of poetry, the hand-off, the sweet ringing of the cash register, the slip of paper with the telephone number, the award goodbye,” and strangers starting conversations over the new arrivals and “checking one another's hands for telltale bands of gold.” (The ring finger!)

Bookstores are inherently romantic, she writes, with the “smell of paper, the soft lighting, the baseline understanding that those inside like to read, and are therefore probably not morons.” (Is it getting hot in here, or is it just me?)

One colleague who worked the night shift reported to her one day that a couple "shuffled up to him, both beaming and bashful, and reported that they'd just gotten engaged on a couch” and asked if there were security cameras, because they'd like to play back that romantic “I DO!” moment. (Is it just me or are you tearing up too?)

Glamour even went further, offering “7 Bookstore Pick-Up Strategies” to meet the love of your life by browsing shelves. 

Head to the “New Releases Section,” is one strategy. “People are much more likely to go to the new releases than ‘Military History’ or other niche spots you could linger in. It's also really easy to ask, ‘Have you read this yet?’ or, conversely, ‘Oh, I just read that. It was amazing, you should definitely get it.’”

If you're crushing on a bookstore employee? Keep it vague, like “I'm getting a book for my mom. She likes…fiction,” so that the employee will spend more time helping you.

Or, if you're trying to hit on someone? Try hitting the travel section. “It’s incredibly easy to make friends in the travel section — everyone perusing it is either planning a trip or interested in potentially planning a trip.” 

“Planning a trip to Paris?” to “Oh, I went to Argentina a few summers ago. It was incredible,” to, “I’m dying to go to Hong Kong, have you been?” are pretty safe conversation starters, compared to this eye-rolling story titled 15 Pick-Up Lines Guaranteed to Work on a Book Nerd  that will land you in handcuffs these days.  (It should be titled “15 Pick-Up Lines Guaranteed to Get You Banned From All Bookstores or Libraries.) 

"Trust me,” the author writes in the 2016 article, "One simple literary pun, and you've got a reader week in the knees.” (Or maybe, in 2022, a kick in the junk knees?) “A lot of pickup lines use wordplay, flattery and innuendo, including the reading-related ones. The only difference is that they use book titles, authors' names, literary terms, and famous bookish couples instead of cheesy lines to make book nerds swoon.” 

Cheesy? Try creepy!

Would you be flattered if someone came up to you at a fucking bookstore or library and asked you, “Is that a hardcover, or are you just happy to see me?” Would you actually fall for, “Boy, you must be a library book, because I can't stop checking you out?”  Or how about this suggested pickup line — “Your body is so banging, what do you say we make a sequel?” (Or more like a call to security?)

On that note, I came across this article below by author Susan Coll, a writer I admi:RE. She writes about finding her dream job working in a bookstore, loss, and literature, and how she found her happily ever after…after she had decided “a life of book celibacy was the answer” to her dating woes.

“But what better way to get to know a person, and to understand him, than to deconstruct his reading book by book?" she asks. 

So, over to this week’s re:books Writer We Admi:RE Susan Cole, whose seventh novel came out earlier this month.

Meet-Cute: Susan Coll on Falling in Love with (and at) a Bookstore

And They All Lived Happily Ever After

I had always dreamed of a job that engaged in some aspect of the business of books. Although I was writing novels and taking on freelance work—for a time I became the queen of the 800-word feature story for a couple of international newspapers, accepting any assignment that came along, from writing about children’s birthday parties to the black market economy in India—I had not had a steady paycheque since my twenties. That was because, middle-aged cliché, I married young and put my career on hold to follow my journalist husband from post to post.

So, at the age of 52, learning that some friends of friends had purchased a bookstore in Washington, DC, I put together a memo full of ideas about ways to expand the store’s offerings through classes and community events. I didn’t know what I was talking about, but I got my own heart pumping and much to my surprise, I was hired.

I threw myself into the job and worked long hours to avoid thinking about the bleeding out of my marriage, a relationship that was going on 32 years. Blood metaphors are a bit dramatic, but even now, when I look around the bookstore, I sometimes imagine a crime scene; I still see the locations where I absorbed each data point of shock.

The office where I sat reading the email informing me that my husband, from whom I was briefly separated, had a girlfriend, and that she was pregnant. The steps in front of the office where I sat with my colleague, Sarah, staring at the traffic, trying to absorb this news. The parking lot around which I paced, weeping as I spoke to my children on the phone.

As soon as I arrived at work each day, I became absorbed by an ecosystem of lovely bookish people who were my instant new family.

Although my memories of a dissolving marriage took place onsite, mostly the bookstore offered a reprieve. As soon as I arrived at work each day, I became absorbed by an ecosystem of lovely bookish people who were my instant new family. Together we worked in service of a daily calendar that is far more gruelling in its rhythms than any of the adorable movies about bookstores would have you think.

Never mind the constant influx of customers, the ringing telephones, the holiday rush–the email flow itself was just as punishing. All of these authors! All of them so verbal about wanting to schedule events to present their books at the store! Sarah and I would pour over the requests, often more eager for a reason to say no than yes, given the backlog of our calendar. A debut novel from an out-of-town author? Perhaps we can catch her for the paperback launch. Another from a best-selling thriller writer? Sounds great, but we just had him in last year. The book was published one month ago? By the time we can work it onto our calendar, five months later, it will be ancient, in publishing terms! Just saying no was a full-time job.

A friend who owns a bookstore recently posted on Twitter that there is no such thing as a book emergency—she was referring to the pressures in publishing jobs. But when it’s time to begin the event and the author has not arrived, or you can’t find his books, or the microphones won’t work, or the computer decides to update itself in the middle of an event, as once happened with a famous New Yorker cartoonist who was attempting to show the audience her slides—it sure feels like an emergency. 

This constant state of emergency was not all bad—the job was all-consuming, which meant I had little time to think. And I didn’t want to think, especially not about my too-quiet house. My children were grown, and in the space of less than a year, my husband had moved out, begun a new family, and my fourteen-year-old Labrador retriever died.

When I stood at the microphone, introducing an author and looking out into the sea of bookish people and all those books, I felt euphoric.

Still, I so loved my new bookish landscape that I felt like I had won the job lottery, that I was the one who had got the better deal in our impending divorce. I was in some liminal state of shock, mostly numb, but when I stood at the microphone, introducing an author and looking out into the sea of bookish people and all those books, I felt euphoric.

Books sustained me for a while, as did the emo music I blasted through my headphones as I walked to work, but I was lonely. In the movies, people are always meeting cute in bookstores: You’ve Got Mail, When Harry Met Sally, Notting Hill, to name a few. Even the couple in the creepy thriller, You, met in a bookstore, although that didn’t end well.

But that didn’t seem to be happening, so less cutely, I went online. I decided to avoid books and writers—both my husband and his girlfriend were writers—and I thought I’d had enough of that in my life. When a lovely but depressed lawyer told me that he didn’t read books, I took that as a good sign. We dated for four months, and I pretended away our literary disconnect as he made fun of me for alphabetizing my bookshelves when I reorganized my half-empty shelves.

Predictably that did not work out—I recall his snarky quip to do with his knowing who Dickens was as he handed me a pile of books whose authors’ names began with the letter “D.” I went on to have my share of requisite sad, bad dates—a man who still lived with his mother and sister, a man who spoke about his wife’s infidelities very loudly in a tiny coffee shop, a man who seemed to be a spy who was possibly still married.

My job was more fulfilling than these dates, and it was around that time that I decided that a life of book celibacy was the answer.

You’ll find love when you stop looking for it is a well-worn and much disputed adage, and I don’t know if I really stopped looking for it or if it found me in my inbox and I was just too swamped to notice.

I was still malingering on the dating app, waiting for my membership to expire, when someone reached out to me. I wasn’t interested, especially not in a writer, and yet he looked interesting, plus he lived a few blocks away. We agreed to meet for a drink in the neighbourhood once he sorted out the comings and goings of his fourteen-year-old daughter. He was a little wacky, born in the Soviet Union, full of Yiddish jokes, and he talked about his love of attack dogs and his knife collection. This was not very promising first-date conversation, but something told me he was not actually a lunatic, and emboldened, I mentioned where I worked. Funny, he had a new book out, he said, and had just been turned down for an event. I asked him the title, and remembered it well. I had in fact just said no; it fell into the easy reject category because of the timing.

But what better way to get to know a person, and to understand him, then to deconstruct his reading book by book?

Was this meeting cute, or the very opposite? Fortunately he thought it was hilarious, and we celebrated our fifth wedding anniversary this summer. He tolerated my desire to merge and alphabetize our book collections, even if the undertaking seemed to him unnecessary. But what better way to get to know a person, and to understand him, then to deconstruct his reading book by book?

There was a fair amount of overlap, which is always a good sign. The project highlighted our mutual love of dark comedy, as well. He wanted to share with me one of his favourites, a book with which I was unfamiliar: The Good Soldier Svejk, by Jaroslav Hasek, but it was nowhere to be found. For weeks he fretted and cursed. Where is that effing Svejk? It was becoming operatic, this mission to find this book. Just buy another copy, I said, offering to order it for him at the store. But he didn’t want to buy another copy—he wanted his book.

Back to the adage about once you stop looking, and there it was, in a pile in his daughter’s room. He handed it to me excitedly. I opened the book and a couple of pieces of ephemera fell out from the crease. An airline menu printed in English and German, and a torn page of the now defunct international newspaper for which I used to write. Half of my name appears, atop one of my 800-word specials, this time about how the recession was affecting European restaurants, written two decades earlier. Presumably he had saved this because he was interested in the book review that day, of Richard Powers’ Operation Wandering Soul, which ran on the same page.

If we had already met cute, this was double cute. Triple cute, really, because the date of the newspaper is 24 years to the very date of our wedding anniversary.

Bookish People by Susan Coll is available from Harper Muse

And a huge shout out to LitHub, where this article was originally printed. Lit Hub is one of my favourite newsletters for book lovers! You can purchase Bookish People by Susan Cole here. You can subscribe to Lit Hub here.

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