Twice-Sold Tales

On Dec. 1, Publishers Weekly posed what could be construed as a hopeful question: "As Bad As It Gets?"

Not likely. After the holidays, most observers believe, things will only get worse.

All of which makes Wonder Book's recent sales volume stand out.

On the first Monday in December, the company filled 2,740 orders, breaking its single-day shipping record. (A year before, that number was 1,171.) More such days would follow, pushing the all-time high to 3,134. Now, four days after that initial record-breaker, Roberts is striding down a warehouse aisle, trying to explain how this million-book Internet thing works.

He's an energetic man of 54 who likes to keep moving. It's hard for a book lover to keep up, because distractions are everywhere.

Look, here's a timely title: Juliet Schor's "The Overspent American." Here are Ann Beattie's "What Was Mine" and Barbara Ehrenreich's "Fear of Falling." And wait, here's a book by short story maestro Raymond Carver that you've somehow never seen.

It's called "No Heroics, Please," and you want to buy it right now. But the warehouse isn't set up to deal with buyers in person. You could schlep over to one of Roberts's two brick-and-mortar stores, in Frederick and Hagerstown, but they carry far fewer titles and you might not find a copy there.

Time to go online.

You click onto one of the major sites on which Wonder and thousands of other dealers, large and small, list used books: Alibris, say, or Amazon or AbeBooks. Alibris has a few dozen copies of "No Heroics, Please," starting at $1.99. Wonder's copy, at $2.10, is third from the top -- but the first two sellers are in Minnesota and Massachusetts, so you pay the extra pennies, hoping to get your Carver fix faster.

The next morning, one of Wonder's 30 or so warehouse employees will print out a fat stack of orders, yours among them. Above the printer hangs a June New Yorker cover showing a UPS guy delivering an Amazon box to a woman who lives right next to a bookstore.

Just another sign of the times.

Using the number assigned to Carver's book when it arrived at the warehouse, someone will pull it from the shelf. By day's end, the harried-looking shippers along the back wall will have it in the mail -- and there will be a couple of thousand books' worth of warehouse room for Roberts to refill.