In fact, I have arranged meetings with the head buyer for him.

She is the catalogue's head buyer and a founder.

"I remember working with a grocery company, and the head buyer was talking about cherry-pickers.

His wife, Linda, the stores' head buyer for women's attire, is equally customer-centric.

"Would the cutters and operators and pressers line up in a hollow square while the head buyer at Sachs' cut off your buttons?"

And just because I work there as a personal shopper, he seems to think I should be able to arrange meetings with the head buyer for him.

"People are looking for better goods," Rob Pitt, head buyer for Crate and Barrel, said.

"The harshest reality is Manhattan real estate," said Linda Marotta, the head buyer for Shakespeare.

At Shakespeake & Company, the head buyer, Linda Marotta, said the chain of three bookstores would continue to stock the book.

Linda Marotta, the head buyer for Shakespeare & Company Booksellers, agrees that the chain stores may be in trouble.

Willona becomes the head buyer of the boutique she worked in and announces that she and Penny are also moving out of the projects.

Linda Marotta, the head buyer at Shakespeare & Co. in Manhattan, is the sort of person Hyperion hoped to impress.

Frank Sanchez, the head buyer for Kepler's, a popular bookstore in Menlo Park, Calif., said the store initially ordered five copies.

In 2001 he secured a job at Uptown records, a European underground music store and has since been promoted to head buyer for the UK garage department.

Howard Appelbaum, vice president and head buyer of the 33-store Kemp Mill record chain in Maryland, recalls Ms. Carey's performance as "good, not incredible."

David Reiss, formerly the head buyer for Zona in SoHo, designs and distributes Italian pewter like bowls and flatware through his New Jersey company, Match.

She has worked her way up from salesgirl to secretary and assistant to the head buyer at a luxury department store (modeled after, and filmed at, Marshall Field's on State Street, Chicago).

He became a student of the nightlife and street fashions, and began working at a fashionable boutique called 'The Pineal Eye' where he would become art director and head buyer for two years.

"I know it's money and it's retail, but I want to put books on display that I think our customers want to see," said Linda Marotta, head buyer for Shakespeare & Company in New York.

Like a novice politician, Mr. Hall shook hands and talked patiently with booksellers both small and powerful, from an assistant store manager in Minneapolis to the head buyer at City Lights, the renowned San Francisco independent.

At California Sunshine, a chain of swimsuit stores in New Jersey, Delaware and other Eastern states, two-piece suits now account for 65 percent of the business, up from 40 percent three years ago, Stephanie Pickelny, the head buyer, said.

Tadayoshi Hatanaka, who is the head buyer for a large bookstore in the Ginza, Tokyo's entertainment district, said a tape of Yukio Mishima reading two of his short stories and being interviewed four years before his suicide, had sold particularly well.

Sales have suffered since Barnes & Noble - with three floors of books and a stylish cafe - opened at 82d and Broadway in April, says Shakespeare's head buyer, Linda Marotta, though she notes that sales have been slow all over the city.

The head buyer explains, "I was about 80 percent sure that I would be coming back into the business, but it was important that I make a contribution on the outside in order to gain the respect of the rest of the people in the store."

While critics might argue that some of the authors should have expended a little more effort honing the craft and a little less swiping the Amex card, Matt Campbell, the head buyer of African-American fiction for Waldenbooks, said the books would find readers.