Photo illustration by Sarah MacKinnon

It turns out so many weird things are said in bookstores that an entire book has been written about it. The 25-year-old author, Jen Campbell, says it happened by accident.

Campbell experienced her fair share of odd conversations at Edinburgh Bookshop, where she worked while she was doing her master’s in English literature at Edinburgh University. After graduating, she moved to London, where she now works at an antiquarian bookstore. “Old books seem to inspire a whole new level of strange requests,” she says.

One day, after a man walked in and asked her if she was sure the “bookshop was a bookshop and not somebody’s house,” Campbell decided to post some of the quotes on her blog. The links to those blog posts were tweeted and retweeted by people in the book industry. “People seemed to find them funny,” she says.

Campbell was at work when a publisher called, saying he and his colleagues thought the quotes were great and wanted to turn them into a book. Weird Things People Say in Bookshops was published in the U.K. in April and has recently been published in North America as Weird Things People Say in Bookstores. Continue…