From Publishers Weekly:
In fall 1917, a group of 15 women booksellers—excluded from membership in the ABA and the Booksellers’ League—met at Sherwood’s Book Store in Manhattan to form the Women’s National Book Association. Membership was open to women in all areas of the book world: publishers, editors, booksellers, authors, librarians, illustrators, and production people.
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The following bookseller quiz is condensed from a Depression-era issue of the WNBA newsletter, The Bookwoman, and is a reminder that some things seem never to change.
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A Quiz for Bookwomen, from the Bookwoman, vol. 3, no. 1.
Are you employed in a bookshop? And how good are you at finding solutions to such vital questions as those given below? Send your answers to the editor, on or before January 15, 1939.
Quiz
1. What is the correct answer to the pompous, “I want to talk to someone who knows the stock”?
2. What line of action do you pursue when you are told of a book you recommend, “Oh but that got an unfavorable review”?
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Answers
1. The correct answer to the pompous, “I want to talk to someone who knows the stock” in my case is “I believe I shall be able to help you Madam (or, Sir) as I ordered the entire stock myself and I am in the book business because I do want to help people select books.”
2. When the retort is “Oh, that got an unfavorable review!” my answer is “Well, reviewers are human, you know and perhaps the reviewer whose opinion you read did not like whimsy (or satire, or Texas, or realism in inland Mississippi, or whatever it may be) but I really believe that this is a book you will enjoy. Frankly, it demands a discriminating reader.”
Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly