Adventures in Bookselling

Today something odd happened. Which in and of itself isn't odd--strange things happen around here with alarming frequency. However this doesn't make them any less bizarre.

This morning a customer handed me book which she claimed was defective. The title: You never Call! You never Write!: A History of the Jewish Mother. I glanced at the cover, the binding, no scuffs or tears or anything that might suggest botched manufacturing. I began to think the lady was pulling a fast one on me, trying to get another 10% knocked off the price for no good reason. I was about to skim through the pages but was intercepted by the somewhat impatient costumer, "It's on the inside," she says.

Hidden between pages 224 and 225 was a thin card with this inspiring, no so subtle bit of proselytizing 'literature' on it:

Jesus answered and said unto him, "Most assuredly, I say unto you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God." (John 3:3, 10:1, 14:6, 6:47-51; Acts 10:38; Rev 1:8)

I have to admit, it made me chuckle. That someone would go this far for so little. Really? A born again advertisement/condemnation in a history of Jewish mothers? This type of book sabotage is unfortunately not uncommon. I once had to go through the entire History of the Middle East section and fix every title having anything to do with Islam because some kind soul had turned each book around so that the spines were facing inward. A stupid prank all in all, but a bunch of the books were actually mangled in the process, probably not a big concern of the prick who did the job. So yeah, I was now a bit concerned other books would be very lazily vandalized.

But upon further exploration I found that the card wasn't simply stuck in the book, wedged down so it wouldn't fall out. It was actually pierced by the threads of the binding. Apparently the printing facilities for this particular press have at least one passive aggressive anti-Semite working very not-so-hard to get their message across to as small as segment of the population as possible. People sure have an odd way of following the edicts of their God. I just wish so many of them weren't so annoying about it.