She who hesitates

A sad occurrence yesterday at Printed Page Bookshop provides a cautionary tale for all of us. A young woman came in and showed me a photo of a vintage poetry book she’d seen in the store a few days earlier. “Do you still have this?” she asked me. Sadly, we had sold the book over the weekend.
People, when you are in a book store and see a book you like, the only smart thing to do is to buy it immediately and without further consideration, unless you, too, want to leave a store empty-handed, crestfallen, regretful and followed by the derisive hails of laughter of a sadistic bookseller.