"There Is a Bookstore Type'

“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.”