I Work in a Lyon Bookshop. Here Is What People Actually Buy on Rainy Saturdays

I have worked in an independent bookshop in the Presqu'île in Lyon for six years. It is a narrow shop with a creaky wooden floor, two rooms, and a cat who belongs to the owner and who sleeps on the poetry table because nobody moves the poetry table.

After six years, I have a theory that nobody believes until they work in a shop: the weather decides what people read. Rainy Saturdays especially have their own pattern. I want to describe it, because it says something about why we read at all.

The first wave: the shelterers

Rain in Lyon tends to arrive suddenly. When it starts, the first people through the door are not really customers. They are shelterers, people caught in the street who come in to stay dry. They browse with wet umbrellas held carefully away from the books, apologising.

You would think they buy nothing. But about one in four of them leaves with something, usually something small and unplanned. Short novels. Thin essays. Books of photographs. Things that can be decided quickly, under the pressure of the rain stopping. I think of these as impulse rescues.

The second wave: the settlers

By late morning, if the rain continues, a different kind of person arrives. These people have looked out the window at home and decided the whole weekend is ruined, and they need a book to fill it. They come in deliberately, often with a bag, and they want something long.

This is when we sell the big novels. Family sagas. Long nineteenth-century classics that people have been meaning to read for years. A man once bought all three volumes of a historical trilogy at eleven in the morning and told me, "It will rain until Tuesday." He was right.

Comfort above all

What surprised me most when I started was how many people on a grey day buy books they have already read. Someone will come in for a new copy of a book they loved as a teenager, because they lent the old one and never got it back, and today feels like the day to reread it.

We also sell more detective novels on rainy days. Not the very dark ones, the gentle ones. A crime in a village, a clever investigator, a cup of tea. I think people want a world where problems can be solved by the last page.

What does not sell

New prize winners do not do especially well in the rain. People buy them on sunny days, oddly enough, when they feel ambitious and social. Self-improvement books also do badly in the rain. Nobody wants to improve themselves when their shoes are wet.

The children's corner

Parents arrive in the afternoon with bored children who have been inside all day. The children's corner fills up, and the shop becomes loud and happy. We sell many picture books on these afternoons, and I always think it is the best part of the job. A five-year-old who chooses her own book with total seriousness is worth any amount of wet floor.

Closing time

At seven we close the shutters. The floor is covered in muddy footprints, the umbrella stand is full of umbrellas people forgot, and the cat has not moved.

I go home with my own book, usually something long. It is raining, after all.