Speaking of getting it wrong.

Search engines are great and all -- in fact, they're miraculous.

But some are better than others. Google is great, in that I can sort of throw a dart into the darkness, misspelling, or missphrased, and there is a really decent chance good old google will read my mind and hit the target.

I think I read once, this is called "fuzzy" in that it's open to a large pool of possibilities.

Some of my distributors, however, have extremely tight search engines.

For instance, I couldn't for the life of me figure out how the Travis McGee mysteries weren't in print. These were some of my favorites when I was younger, and I couldn't believe that someone wasn't publishing them.

It would've helped if I had searched for John D. MacDonald, instead of John. D. McDonald....

Still, you know, I did search for John and D. and Donald -- you'd think that would be enough.

I've begun to realize that my instincts for what is likely to be in print and what is likely not to be in print are pretty accurate. So, if I'm not finding what I'm looking for, I'm just not looking correctly.

What's amazing to me, is the realization that if I keep on bringing into the bookstore books that with which I'm familiar, that I've had some exposure to at some point in my life, and if I keep the full range of titles by those authors I like, complete series in stock; and I get in books I'm curious about, but haven't yet read; a nd so on -- just the books I actually have some feel for:

That I could easily fill a bookstore twice my size.

I mean, I read a lot, but I wouldn't have thought I read THAT much. Just reading and reading and reading, and at some points in my life pretty much doing nothing BUT reading, and reading about reading, and reading reviews and seeing titles and covers, and even my small little world of experience is bigger than a store I can actually create.

Add in books that I'm only marginally familiar with but which sound great; recommendations by customers or reviewers I trust, and new books that have yet to find their legs, and well, there is a bookselling challenge for a lifetime.