There’s a used bookstore a few blocks from us, Ridgeline, that I’ve been trading books into since not long after we moved here, and the owner, an older guy who’s run the place for something like twenty years, has a trade policy that seemed arbitrary to me at first and now feels like the most honest thing about the whole store. He won’t take everything. He’ll flip through a stack you bring in, hand half of it back, and tell you plainly why, water damage, a popular enough title he’s already overstocked, or, more interestingly, a book he just doesn’t think will move for someone browsing his specific shelves.

The first time it happened I was a little offended, in the small, silly way you get offended when a stranger judges your taste based on what you’re trying to get rid of. But I kept bringing books back anyway, because the store itself is good, tightly curated in a way most used shops aren’t, and slowly I started noticing a pattern in what got rejected versus accepted that had nothing to do with condition or popularity, it was about whether a book had a clear enough audience to actually find its next reader on his shelves specifically. A perfectly fine book can still be the wrong book for a given shelf, which is a distinction I now apply constantly to my own writing here, whether a review actually belongs on this site or whether I’m just excited about something that doesn’t fit what I’m actually trying to do with it.

I asked him once, straight out, how he decides, and he shrugged and said something like, he’s not curating what’s good, he’s curating what this particular shop is for, and that’s stuck with me the same way the manuscript comma splice did. Not every good sentence belongs in every piece. Not every good book belongs on every shelf. It’s a small, practical, unglamorous kind of editorial judgment, applied to secondhand paperbacks instead of prose, and I think about it more than I probably should for something that’s technically just an errand I run every few months with a canvas bag of books I’ve already finished with.