Special Invitation

It was a quiet day at Horden’s Antiquarian Books – but then so many days were quiet days.  Sometimes Ellie wondered how GG made enough money from selling his books to even cover the utilities and rates for the shop, let along her wages and some income for him. 

Quiet or not, there was always work to do.  Ellie’s recent to Old Jenkin’s place to see what books he had of value had added an enormous lot of stock which had to be processed.  As she suspected GG was very keen to have all the books she had identified – in fact he went and looked himself and came to the view that he could handle the whole lot, one way or another, and so he made an offer to Margaret that she could not refuse.  There were so many books that the total offer seemed generous but the unit price per book was plenty good enough for GG to be sure he would more than cover his costs.

When a pile of books like this came in the first task was to create an inventory of the stock.  A nifty database program enabled all relevant information about a book to be recorded and for the book to be given a category – Shop Stock, Trade Sales and boxes of odds and sods for second hand books sellers – this latter category included paperback fiction and other books that were what you might call Popular rather than Serious literature.

This work was generally done by GG working quietly in his office while Ellie was looking after the shop.  But this was a big job, so Ellie had a stack of books in her work area and she was adding records to the database.  The job was going to take a bit more than the week and when it was finished they had added over 5000 titles to their database.

While they were working away at this, Ellie asked GG if he had ever thought of having a web-site for his bookshop. 

“What would I do that for?” he asked – simple as that.

“It just seemed to me,” Ellie venture, “that with a web site he could be selling books to people from all over the state, Australia, even the world.  You don’t sell books that everyone else has got – and your price can only be as much as people in Quarabup are willing to pay you.”

“Well, well, well my young lady.  You really have been catching on to the business, and I suppose you are right.  I probably never thought of it because I thought it would be all too complicated to both keep up to date, and to supply customers where ever they are.  How much would it cost, do you think?”

Ellie gave him a bit of a run-down – domain name, internet provider for hosting the web site, web-design and web-maintenance.  It could add up to a fair bit, but Ellie was sure that if buyers from the city knew what books he had he could get much better prices than he gets just from the shop, or from selling in the trade.  AND she mentioned that if the web-site had the right applications she could use their database to easily keep the stock list on the web up to date as easy as pie.  GG was happy to leave it at that, and so was Ellie.

When she came back from her lunch break, GG seemed in the mood for a chat, but not about the internet.  He began by saying they had had a good meeting of the Gilbert & Sullivan Society Committee last night.  He reminisced over their recent show “Gondoliers” for which they had sought set designs from the set-designer for the Perth Society, which they had never done before.  Some of their own sets were suitable for the Quarabup venue and they made up some new pieces so that it really looked good – just like Venice.

The local paper had taken a line in reporting the show that hinted at the possibility of Quarabup having its own Venetian Quarter, if the Blue Lagoon Canals Project got up.  The thought had never occurred to GG but it made him smile at how politics had a way of getting into everything.

“You did some G&S at school didn’t you, Ellie?”

“We did ‘Joseph’ this year,” she said, “but last year we did ‘Mikado’ and I loved it.  I even thought I would love to go to Japan because the costumes were so gorgeous, but I suppose it really isn’t like that.”

“You are probably right, but we are going to have a go at it, too.  It has been about 6 years since we did it and we want to build a completely new set.  What part did you do at school?”

“I was the Second Sop – Peep Bo.  I was scared stiff of some of the speaking parts, but I loved the songs.”

“Well you must try out for our show.”

“But you’ve already got your good singers for the lead parts.  I wouldn’t be nearly good enough, I’m sure.”

But there was no putting GG off the idea.  He knew all the usual crew, and he assured her that a confident up-and-coming voice like hers would displace a wobbly old Sop who was 5 or 10 years past her prime.  He would not give up till she had agreed to try put at the auditions at the end of the following week.  All she had to do was sing the lead part of the “Three Little Maids” and they would then decide where her voice fitted within the trio or chorus.

When the auditions came round, Ellie decided that she had nothing to lose, even if they were much better singers than her, and if they chose her, then should was going to make the most of it.  This meant for her, that she was able to get her anxiety level down to being able “to make the butterflies fly in formation” as they say.  As a result her voice was strong and secure and she won the part hands down.  GG was one of four on the Audition Panel but he declined to participate in the selection of the three little maids – he thought people might get the wrong impression if it turned out that Ellie was selected.  Just as well, because when she was selected no-one was then able to say he had influenced people.

With the auditions settled, the Company was then sorted into rehearsal nights – Chorus on Wednesday evenings, with some principles joining in Chorus parts as required – and Principals Rehearsals on Thursday evenings.  Principals Rehearsals were much more in the way of vocal training for the lucky candidates, and they even had some one-on-one coaching for their particular parts.  They also had to do work on their spoken parts.  Ellie was involved both nights.

This was the first time since school had finished that Ellie felt she was in a group of other adults as an equal among them – she was a young adult, but she was definitely no longer a school kid.  She really liked it.

By the end of that day’s work, Ellie had begun to gather information for GG that might help him agree to set up a web-site.  She knew a couple of kids from school who were doing really good web-stuff, and she searched the web for ideas about web-platforms that bookshops might use.  Most of them used an Excel base that has been modified for search and stock control purposes.  The Database at work used an Excel foundation, too and could report in table form which would be vital for populating the web-page.

She wrote up her findings and then printed out some of the key data pages that would help GG as he considered this idea.  As she was leaving, she swung by his office and planted the pages right in front of him – “Just thought you would like some bed-time reading” she said and was gone.