Dude was dressed in a snazzy three-piece suit that looked like it probably would’ve covered my rent for the better part of a year. Dude was alternately begging and being aggressive.

“But I’m here now, I’ll buy it, right now!” mixed with “You don’t know how much I need to have a copy of that book!” to “This is retarded!”

Yeah, well, we’ve also been sold out of it for six hours, so why don’t you go cry to the publisher?

He wanted a copy of Game Change, another insider’s tale of the 2008 election, this one written by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, that’s already made impact on the political world: witness Mr. Harry Reid’s current controversy, where he is quoted as having said Obama’s appeal was partially because he was “light-skinned . . . with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”

We only got twenty-four copies of the book to begin with*. That was probably a bad sign, especially since an internal memo was posted to Bookmark, the Bookstore’s corporate intranet site, alerting staff of (among other things, erroneous lay-down information from the publisher) the media attention the book was receiving. We were sold out by noon.

Okay, so technically, we weren’t sold out of it: we had a couple of copies on hold for customers behind the registers. But even though the vast majority of people don’t pick up their holds, violating that reserve feels sacrilegious: especially since, as things go, I’d probably be working the cashwrap when the person’s whose hold we raped came up looking for their title, and I’d take the brunt of their anger.

No, thanks.

*Don’t yell at us: yell at HarperCollins.