All is not lost

Yesterday I was sad. My books were lost. Losing books is always traumatic. It was too late to do anything official, and Nick had the credit card receipt with the info on it, so instead I blogged and whined on twitter.

(You know what? My online friends are all bibliophiles. They completely understood why this was a big deal. Hooray for online friends.)

And not one but two really nice things happened.

Chaz Brenchley saw my post, and offered to replace the missing Outremer books from his stash. If you think that’s a terribly nice thing to do, you should go vote for his new book at the Book Tournament (Jade Man’s Skin by Daniel Fox, since it isn’t obvious). And then you should go buy his new book so he can write some more. (It’s on my to-read stack, so I can’t recommend it from first-hand experience yet, but the series sounds fascinating.)

And then Powell’s customer support found my blog post, apologized, and said they were looking for replacement books, and would refund payment on anything that couldn’t be replaced. Now that’s customer service! The photo of the USPS label I posted was enough to identify the order and pull their record of what was in the box.

I’m very impressed. I’ve been a Powell’s fan since my first visit over 15 years ago, and have purchased piles of things, new and used, in person and online, and will definitely keep doing so. You should go buy something there too. (But buy the Daniel Fox book new, please, so the publisher gets good sales numbers and the author gets royalties.)

Actually, three good things happened: the Powell’s box with the novels in it showed up. The box that got munched was actually a different Powell’s order, one I hadn’t known about from when Nick went back on his own. The really big box from our first expedition is fine. Nick lost a stack of art books, but none of them are particularly hard to find, so he should be getting other copies.

Today I am not so sad.