Stress and uncertainty and the spending of money.

I'm not sure whether to do this or not.

I started going through lists of cult favorite and classic novels and making orders for them. I figure there is somewhere around a couple of grand in solid books I could order right now. Because of the reorganization, I actually have room to display them for once.

These are the kinds of books that most often sell in my store. It's the basis of my inventory. In comparison, I checked the top-selling books in the country right now and there were only two I wanted: Stephen King's Outsider and the latest John Grishem in paperback. I mean, the rest is junk.

I wonder why I don't just have every significant Kafka book, every Camus, every Bukowski, every...well, the list is long, but really--I think it's more or less possible to get a lot of the significant novels over the last couple of centuries within my budget. Maybe my budget for several months instead of one month, so I'm trying to decide whether to take that chance.

I have most of July and August and first half of September to sell, and then I have Christmas coming up.

Am I sure most of these books will sell? Yes, pretty much. But not all at once. So it's a bit of an investment, because I'm going to want to keep them in stock. So they more or less have to sell 3 times to make them worth stocking in the long run.

But I've already decided that games and books need to grow and the only way to do that is to invest.

I can't be sure this isn't all a rationalization to spend money. I'll say this: I think this the kind of spending that has kept the store vibrant over the years---and it has also caused great stress over the years.

Then again, maybe running a store just involves stress and uncertainty.