“One thing taboo in bookselling is to let customers know what you think of their purchases.”
Not long ago a reader commented on a post I wrote more than seventeen years ago, just three
weeks after starting Anecdotal Evidence. He joined nine others who likewise
remember Kay’s Books in Cleveland, the store I patronized from age twelve and
worked for as a clerk in 1975. In my sappier moments I think of it as the best
job I ever had, though the pay was laughable and the shop’s owner was a
periodic monster. It says something that people remember with fondness a
bookstore that closed forty years ago. I doubt they would write tributes and
share memories of a defunct shoe store.
The author
of the passage at the top is Peter Schwendener, who published “Reflections of a Bookstore Type” in the Autumn 1995 issue of The
American Scholar. At the time he was working as a clerk in a Barnes &
Noble “superstore” in Evanston, Ill., in those bucolic pre-Amazon days. That’s
a very different environment from Kay’s, which conformed to old stereotyped
notions of bookstore décor. Most of the clerks were young (I was twenty-two)
and we reveled in the seediness and disorder. Not all of us were serious
readers but one guy, Clark Unger, had two passions in life: The Beatles and
Henry James. The store was downtown on Prospect Avenue and attracted an
eclectic and often raffish clientele. Schwendener writes:
“[I]t is far
from a bad job. The conventional wisdom, in fact, is that as far as retail work
goes, working in a bookstore is as good as it gets. The job depresses me, when
it does, simply because it pays barely
enough to live on, but I can suffer that, for now at least.”
Precisely my
attitude. I have less financial-planning sense than your average hobo, but I
see that Schwendener has come up in the world and appears to have a successful
musical career. My experience, again, is similar. Soon after leaving Kay’s I
landed my first job as a newspaper reporter/editor. However, as Schwendener writes: “There is a
bookstore type, and I am afraid I am of that type. I like being around books, even
crappy ones.” Same here.
The line at
the top amused me because at Kay’s we were young and snotty and seldom censored
ourselves. I once told a customer who brought a Mickey Spillane title to the
cash register that his books were “shit,” the guy couldn’t write and his popularity
proved my point. To his credit, the customer shrugged his shoulders and handed me
the cash. My opinion, rightly, didn’t interest him. Schwendener closes with
some interesting sociological observations:
“What one observes in many booksellers, myself very much included, is an interest in, yes, the arts combined with a disinclination to align oneself with the forces of hard-core bohemia, the wearers of black clothing who swarm in cafés and have earned from an acquaintance of mine the name ‘art nuns.’ I have known many bohemians, and, contrary to what some may think, they often work, but not at bookstores, which are incurably square places, really: they earn whatever money they need at copy stores, as waiters and waitresses, or as bartenders.”
4 comments:
I've probably mentioned this piece too often, but it's so interesting, I'll mention it again: "Bookshop Memories," an essay by George Orwell describing his time was a bookstore employee in the early 1930s in England. Today's column reminds me a lot of Orwell's piece.
Just read your post from 2006. I love it - and, in a rare event, the comments are as good as the piece. Mrs. Kay (1912-2000). RIP.
The description of the store reminded me of the venerable Acres of Books in Long Beach, CA, one of Ray Bradbury's favorite haunts. I prowled that store from the early '70s until its forced demise in the late '80s, I think.
Kay's had boxes and boxes of old magazines upstairs. I recall being age twelve or so, and searching through them for hot rod magazines, pop music magazines, or just generally weird stuff. In my innocence, I was always surprised at how many muscle-man magazines there were. Who looks at these things? I wondered.
Wonderful post both for your Spillane anecdote and the rest of the bookselling business. Cleveland in the '70s seems to have been a world unto itself and un- or underappreciated for it until recently (for its proto-punk scene among other things).
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