Second Shelf to the Right

The dinner party included guests from all over the globe. Our hosts had invited a clutch of exchange students and their American “parents” for a get-acquainted dinner. The older generation lingered at table, talking about places, travel and hometowns. One couple works in real estate, and they and our hosts could talk about their San Jose neighborhood in a kind of shorthand. “The one with the blue and white flowers” was enough to conjure up an exact address. A foyer glimpsed during Halloween trick-or-treating, a trellis of noteworthy curb appeal—the mere mention of such details sparked anecdotes about scandals (“He was the Precious Cheese murderer”) or analysis of educational trends (“That's a St. Chris neighborhood now”). Their expertise left me a little breathless. Was there any local geography I knew as well as these folks knew theirs?

Maybe one bit. I work part-time in a children's bookstore, and I know its dimensions as surely as the Narnia quartet knew their wardrobe. I can tell you where the Wild Things are—in hardcover, in paperback, in finger puppets and in the store's decor. I can lead you to a forest of Magic Tree House books and to a door that J.K. Rowling autographed. If I have a day in which I do not remember who wrote Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, I need not go to the computer to find Judi Barrett's name and seek her alphabetically. Instead, my autopilot flies to a top left shelf. My finger plucks a paperback forth for the customer who has asked, from the uncertainty of his memory, “Do you have a funny book about a meatball?”

Everybody on the staff of Hicklebee's, in San Jose, Calif., a nationally known independent bookstore, can do this parlor trick, and sometimes it seems the customers come in just to watch us do it. They've all been to bookstores where someone at the information kiosk checks a computer and points across a cavernous showroom and says, “It's in Sociology.” At Hicklebee's, customers are gently led amid thousands of titles nicely crammed into 3,400 square feet. We walk straight to the fairy tales that their mothers read to them, or to novels that promise to convert a reluctant reader, or to picture books whose protagonist has their own child's name. “Do you have Goodnight Moon?” they ask tentatively, little understanding that their question is easier than asking us if Bambi defecates in the woods. Of course, we can lead them to the Great Green Room.

This shelf geography is the kind of sense memory that Proust found in madeleines or that lesser mortals find in their first lover's perfume. We know books by where we found them. Young adults walk in the store's front door, shoot a glance to the left, and wail, “Oh, you got rid of the bathtub.” No, we reassure them. The reading tub lined with soft pillows that they remember from their childhoods is at the back of the store now, next to the Brio train table. (On some days we can direct them to that corner by the scent of orange air freshener. Toddlers, lost in the rapture of the train table, invariably fill their diapers.)

Most of the store's action occurs at a gigantic X-shaped arrangement of shelves in the middle of the room. This X marks the store's trove of picture books. The most accessible art in America is here, alongside its most beautifully succinct writing. Whole worlds get created, 32 pages a pop. I try to merchandise the X the way a real estate agent might stage a property. Mostly that means making sure that favorite books are face out. In this way, we've sold many copies of Margaret Shannon's wonderfully subversive The Red Wolf, despite its resting in the shadow of a gigantically popular book next door, David Shannon's Too Many Toys. Facing books out is the bookstore equivalent of making the kitchen smell of cinnamon during an open house.

It's December—and time for customers to wonder where their copy of The Polar Express is. We can help with that, and also show you a Night Before Christmas in any price range. We can recommend something off the adult table. See us anytime your imagination needs a new place to dwell: We've got multiple listings.