Postscripts

Last week, while reading our guide to Central Texas barbecue, I noticed an item of food described as "sweet, dark, and zesty." After recovering from the mild shock I experienced upon realizing the disturbingly sensual nature of that particular triad of adjectives, I moved on to jealousy, jealousy for the fact that book critics rarely, if ever, get to use adjectives like those.

I went to the new airport on Sunday in the hope that "reviewing" the Book People that has been planted right in the middle of Bergstrom would grant me free access to all sorts of wild adjectives I previously had felt skittish toward. Maybe it would be "luscious," "tender," and "tasty." "Light" and "airy" is more like it. The 1,400-square-foot store is a glass box that rises up from the ground in a surprisingly subtle way, and the store designers have managed to make almost every title a face-out, where customers can see the entire face of the book instead of just its spine. Being inside the Bergstrom Book People made me feel very modern, and watched, but that's probably because I was being watched since there were TV news crews "monitoring activity" at Book People and the other airport stores.

About the only thing Book People and its airportlocation have in common is the same name, though how many airport bookstores have you been to where the staff bends over backward to help the customers? While I was there, I swear the staff-to-customer ratio must have been 1:1, and nearly all of the staff was out on the floor, dodging children on the loose and asking people if they needed help. The Bergstrom Book People staff don't resemble the Book People staff at Sixth & Lamar for two reasons: They wear uniforms and they don't wear those highly individualized name tags whose owners almost without fail manage to obfuscate their name with art. (Well I'll be damned, is that the point?)

But Bill Baco, the director of retail operations for CA One Services, says that the CA One employees at the Bergstrom Book People won't be drones. "Our goal is to educate them and have them love books. I don't want people there that are just there to ring the register and leave. I really want people that enjoy what they're doing and have a love for the book," he says. CA One runs stores in about 30 airports across the nation, but Bergstrom is the first in which the company has tied itself to a local bookstore. The philosophy behind putting local stores at the airport is called the "gateway philosophy," which Baco explains as "essentially bringing some of the strongest, most well-known either restaurants or retailers right into the airport, so you bring a feel and flavor of that market right into that airport." "Typically, we operate our own bookstore -- it's part of a newsstand bookstore," Baco says. "The gateway concept is a little slower in coming on retail than it is in food and it doesn't necessarily work in every market, but here in Austin you had quite a few good retailers, where it made sense." ... Some local writers sense that if there is a regular space available for local musicians to perform at the airport there should also be a space for local writers to hold readings. That, at least, is one of the discussion topics of the new Schedule C Writers' Group that has its origins in the Austin Writers' League but is open to published writers who may not be AWL members. The group is meeting on Monday, June 7 at the Treehouse Italian Grill at 6:30pm. Discussion at that meeting will concern what AWL can offer published writers in terms of publicity; call 326-9300 for more information.