If you could create a bookstore, what would you put in
it? What would you exclude? Would you specialize in any particular genre? Would
your organizing principle be quantity or quality, or would you devise a way to
have both?
Nearly all bibliophiles‹that peculiar breed of people who
feel more at home in bookstores than in their actual homes‹have at some point
posed such questions and daydreamed about the utopian store they would
construct in answer to them, the store that would smoothly combine expertise
and aesthetic preference with comfort and commercial viability.
Except for the quixotically determined few who actually
open a store, most book lovers must be content to tend to the garden of their
own libraries.
But for a few years, I had the chance to put speculation
into practice. I worked at Housing Works Bookstore, one of the retail arms of
the venerable New York H.I.V./AIDS nonprofit that was started in the
nineteen-eighties by members of ACT UP. Like the organization¹s thrift stores,
the bookstore is run largely by volunteers and receives its stock entirely from
donations. So at any given time, crowded under the steam pipes of the store¹s
basement and sub-basement, are scores of boxes of books‹from publishers or
magazines getting rid of their overflow, from the apartments of lifelong
readers who have died, or simply from the shelves of New Yorkers who need to
clear space. In those boxes is the raw material to make a bookstore. My job was
to sift their contents, relying on my tastes and book-floor experience to
select the stock. And influenced by the same fond madness that allows
booksellers to continue to believe, despite overwhelming evidence to the
contrary, that the book-buying public still wants their guidance, I am certain
that you will be interested in reading an essay about book sorting.
Interested in part, I hope, because it may shed some
light on the doings of a strange and ancient guild. Last year, the novelist
Nicole Krauss wrote an essay for The New Republic extolling booksellers and
lamenting their approaching extinction. Krauss contended that the value of the
bookseller is specifically in his role as a ³curator²: ³one who selects, edits,
and presents a collection that reflects his tastes.² He thus stands in stark
contrast‹and, Krauss thinks, doomed subordinacy‹to the infinite catalogue at
Amazon.com, which purports to impose no judgments on its listings, except
inasmuch as it tailors its suggestions to the user¹s own recorded preferences.
Krauss came in for some criticism from readers who felt
she was romanticizing the bookseller¹s role. In reality, many pointed out,
people are far more likely to take the recommendations of a friend, or a
twitter feed, or an Amazon reader review than from a random bookstore employee.
Cruel gibes were made about the book clerk who told a
customer to find ³Uncle Tom¹s Cabin² in Home Reference, or to the one who could
never locate the Divine Comedies because the database said it was written by
someone named Alighieri.
As a longtime book clerk, I object‹I¹ve hand-sold
hundreds of books, after all‹while also admitting that elements of these
complaints are undeniably true. Unlike online catalogues, booksellers are both
fallible and limited; they not only make mistakes but also prioritize according
to predisposition.
A certain tension has always existed between what
bookstores deign to stock and what book-buyers think they want to get. Even if
a shopper doesn¹t ask a clerk for suggestions, the very selection on the
shelves conspires to tell him what he ought to be reading. Bookstores require a
sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes even annoying amount of humility from their
patrons. As a veteran bookstore owner once indiscreetly confided to me: ³We do
this for the books, not for the customers.²
Why do we put up with this? Why, indeed, do we cherish
it? The reason is that bookstores are human places‹they are extensions of the
personalities of the men and women who operate them. This is the point of
Krauss¹s essay that still very much obtains: bookstores are, in her word,
³thoughtful.² Thoughtful may mean wise, but it doesn¹t have to; it doesn¹t even
have to mean rational (everyone has been in bookstores that were clearly run by
crazy people‹often they¹re the best ones). It simply means organized by
individual minds. And to the extent that we believe we can learn from other
people‹a belief fundamental to the very practice of reading‹bookstores will
have something to give us.
It¹s good to remember this as brick-and-mortar stores fall
deeper into a crisis that is both economic and existential (store owners are
compelled to sell their books online in order to keep open their financially
untenable physical shop; Barnes & Noble has been forced to sink its
resources into e-readers, thereby speeding its own obsolescence). If they are
going to survive, it may be crucial for us to have some understanding, and some
appreciation, of the minds behind them.
I have worked at four bookstores. Two were Barnes &
Nobles, the unjustly maligned chain megastore. It¹s true that the mind
governing these stores is corporate, but the staff tends to be far better read
and more informed than detractors allow, and the selection is large and
egalitarian.
I worked, too, at the Strand bookstore, the Manhattan institution
that boasts the impossible-to-verify claim of having eighteen miles of books.
The Strand¹s most distinctive characteristic is its lupine voracity. It opened
on Book Row in the nineteen-twenties among dozens of other bookshops, but like
some apex predator, it is the only one that has survived. It is hungry for your
books‹it wants to buy them cheap and sell them slightly less cheap.
Read the full essay:
Footnote:
Thanks to Brian Easton for bringing this entertaining piece to my notice.
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