As a buyer, I had to meet with vendors and authors who wanted me to sell their books.

I was feted, given exotic and strange gifts (my favorite were these Romeo y Julieta cigars that were smuggled out of Cuba), given alcohol- all in efforts to get me to sell books. I even once "modeled" for the cover of an erotica book, but that's a story for another day.

The freakiest and most annoying people, without a shadow of a doubt, were the Church of Scientology folks.

They wanted me to order and do a window display of nothing but Dianetics, which would mean I would have to order a couple hundred to a thousand of those orange and black books.

As a special gift for doing that, they dangled the prospect of having John Travolta (Tom Cruise wasn't as big back then) *actually* coming in to do a SIGNING of the books- you know, as if he actually wrote it.

Pushy vendor was in there for at least an hour trying to schmooze me into it.

I ended up ordering about 6.

They collected dust where I put them-  the SCIENCE FICTION section, next to Battleship Earth and the rest of L. Ron Hubbard's non-selling science fiction (which, incidently, was ridiculous considering our sci-fi section sold pretty well).

My point you, ask?

 Oh, yes.

Tom Cruise is nuts.

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