The woman who expected readers

A woman in Damanhour became convinced that parents in her town would buy secondhand children's books, if only someone collected them and sold them properly.

Her friends told her there was no market. Children here do not read for fun, they said, and parents will not pay for used things.

Once she believed it, she started noticing. The mother in the stationery shop asking whether there was anything for a nine-year-old that was not a school text. The grandfather with a bag of his own children's old storybooks, wondering who might want them. The cousin who drove to Alexandria twice a year just to find books in a language her son was learning. The boxes of outgrown picture books in half the flats on her street.

None of this was new. It had always been there. Her friends walked down the same street and saw none of it, because they had no reason to look.

We like to say that seeing is how we come to believe. That is how evidence is supposed to behave. In practice it more often runs the opposite way. A customer, a need, a gap that nobody is filling: these are rarely hidden. They are simply unnoticed by the people who have already decided they are not there.

The person who expects to find something is the one who keeps their eyes open long enough to find it. Nobody discovers a market they are certain does not exist.