Paper Problems
"Heaven!" the man announced to me, blissfully gazing around at the books, piled row on row to form a kind of sky. He's certain that to be surrounded by books and work in a bookstore is as dreamy as sitting on your own personal cloud. Well, yes and no. After spending three years as a bookseller when I was in my twenties, I can safely say that the heaven of bookselling has its share of little demons.
In a 1936 essay called Bookshop Memories, George Orwell complains about the customer who "doesn't remember the title or author's name or what the book was about but she does remember that it had a red cover." The fact that I can relate to that so many decades later is amusing but also a little
worrying. Orwell was struck by "the rarity of really bookish people," explaining "our shop had an exceptionally interesting stock, yet I doubt whether ten percent of our customers knew a good book from a bad one." True, it's difficult to help those people who've "read everything by Tom Clancy" and want another author "just like him." It strikes me as admitting that you want to read the same book repeatedly. I tried to get customers to take a step up, and once felt satisfied to convince a teenager to skip from John Grisham to Arthur Conan Doyle. But I was often frustrated at directing people to Danielle Steele when they could be setting their sights higher. Orwell mentions that authors like Hemingway are not the big sellers, but that many go home with "Ethel M. Dell." I've never heard of Dell, which suggests that there's always an author as popular as they are vacuous and transient. It's difficult is to recommend something when an author's books are all the same to you. Orwell is right to point out that sometimes "a bookseller has to tell lies about books."
People appeared to have an aversion to short stories. Orwell suggests people avoid them, but blames it on a lazy desire to spend energy on one concept only, wanting to luxuriate in it for a while. I didn't make a habit of asking for their reasons, but had people tell me that they "don't read short stories" or that they want something they "can sink their teeth into." This could help explain the general lack of interest in poetry as well. It seems the shorter the format, the more there's a perception of work involved. Orwell also states that "Dickens is one of those authors whom people are 'always meaning to' read, and, like the Bible, he is widely known at second hand." One of the sad experiences I had as a bookseller involved helping a woman who wanted Great Expectations. She didn't, however, want the book by Dickens but insisted on taking the novel based on the screenplay for a new film, which I will never understand. We sold 5 a month of the Dickens book before the release of that film, and 60 a month for a while afterwards, meaning not everyone went for the novel based on the screenplay, though it's unfortunate that it takes a film to galvanize interest in such a readable, enjoyable novel.
Language experts should spend time in bookstores, not for the books but for the speech patterns of customers. A percentage of people avoid complete sentences like the plague, little realizing that any time saved is often lost in the confusion that follows. People walking up and saying "Schlink" barely get across that they want The Reader, by Bernard Schlink. It's tempting to blurt out a nonsensical reply and pretend the whole thing is a word association game. I watched a businessman approach an employee and say "Business books?" When she didn't quite hear and asked him to repeat it, he began flapping the arms of his suit like an alarmed penguin, saying "Business books! Business books!" Had the man actually formed a question it might have helped. On the other end of the scale, some people tell you a story to ask you a question, explaining they were in the store "last Tuesday afternoon, about three, with my mother…"
Orwell mentions the "vague-minded" customer, and I think of the people who ask that I practically take them by the hand to the book they want. I've been asked why our fiction and non-fiction isn't together, and why you have to go "all the way down to the first floor to pay," as though the customer planned to pay on the third floor and then leap out a window. Or, why there aren't scientists to help you in the science section (as well as, presumably, doctors in the medical section and so on). Anybody in retail is paid too little to be patient with whatever vague or spiteful person walks in off the street. Forget the year of military service some countries make you do, everyone should be forced to work in retail. And listen up, authors: if you're going to arrive spontaneously to sign copies of your books, remember to turn on the politeness, because you're dealing with the people that will sell them after you're gone.
This is not to suggest that there weren't kind people, but as much as they're appreciated, memories of considerate people wash away quickly. There is no heavier ink than bitterness. Orwell doesn't actually mention the hostility of customers, but I believe this is partly because he worked in a local, independent bookshop rather than a larger chain where I found people were sometimes offended at any lack of convenience. It was more or less expected that we'd have any title, or could get it in "a couple of days." A man asked me why it took weeks to get a book from England when he could fly there "in four hours," and I had to explain in polite terms that because he was going to buy a forty dollar book didn't mean someone rushed out to buy a six hundred dollar plane ticket.
When my store opened it was one of the first large-format stores in downtown Toronto, inviting people to browse and sit and drink coffee. At first, people seemed to think it must be some kind of library and sometimes asked if they could buy the books. But people became quickly accustomed to the indulgence, adopting the idea we should provide everything. I was so used to the anger that was ignited as soon as I said our 2-6 week estimate for a special order (we hadn't changed how fast publishers would ship a book) that I almost felt we were educating the city one outburst at a time. Yes, we had a wider selection than smaller bookstores, but couldn't summon a book in an ambulance if we didn't have it.
At large-format bookstores the rules can be bent so that if you want to abuse the system you can come every day and stay for hours on end. I've found bookmarks in some books. The man I called Tom Clancy (because he looked like the author), eventually took to tipping a garbage can over so that he had something elevated for his feet. A woman once verbally blasted a co-worker of mine because one of her favourite authors ended up split between two bookcases. While I was at the special orders desk one quiet morning, a man came along and scooped up my paperwork and then gave the pages back slowly, one at a time, while asking me questions like "Do you think I'm crazy?" Orwell explains "In a town like London there are always plenty of not quite certifiable lunatics walking the streets, and they tend to gravitate towards bookshops, because a bookshop is one of the few places where you can hang about for a long time without spending any money. In the end, one gets to know these people almost at a glance." The difference then, is that now invite them to hang around.
Orwell explains his frustration with the various sidelines his bookstore had, and I often wished our large-format store concentrated on being a good bookstore and didn't bother with magazines, audiocassettes, compact discs, cards and candles. Nothing made me look more incompetent than to be caught by a customer in the multimedia section. People failed to recognize that one person isn't familiar with a forty thousand square foot store. Sometimes the greater your diversity, the weaker you are at each of those things, and you can't be as selective about staff when you need an army. When Maya Angelou visited our store, asking a cashier "Do you have the works of Maya Angelou?" the cashier replied, "Who's she?"
We didn't suffer (as Orwell did) from keeping the store cold to prevent the display windows from fogging up. We did, however, have the air-conditioning woman, who cornered staff to complain about how cold it was (we didn't agree), and slept in a chair, sometimes cutting her own hair. Orwell mentions that a bluebottle loves to crawl up onto a book and die, and while I can't relate to that, I did leave the store dizzy from paint fumes hanging around in a bad air-circulation system.
Orwell undoubtedly worked alongside the owner, especially if the novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying is any indication, but I rarely met head office people. They only appeared, and we were expected to know who they were. Once, one of them poked me in the back without introducing herself to say, "Can you go help that person?" I could never imagine what head-office people did to deserve real salaries that we didn't. We were the faces that represented the company in public, and we were the ones forced to read the titles of the erotic books to the creepy old blind man, the staff scattering like mice whenever he arrived.
Today I prefer to shop at independent stores, though I don't think it's fair to be disdainful about every aspect of large-format stores. It may have been a head-on collision between those who only cared about books and those who only cared about business — and both are shortsighted for various reasons — but I did make many real and lasting friends from among my coworkers, and there were many pleasant customers who recognized I'm a person and wanted to chat about books. It has been said before, but the biggest problem with large-format stores, in my view, is the tendency to hurt small publishers with large orders (that are expensive for publishers to produce) followed by large returns. This could be helped with a small-press section in large-format stores – one that potentially ordered small amounts and had a non-return policy. I think Orwell would agree smaller presses are frequently the first stop for later, bestselling authors. And he might agree that whatever the size of the store, bookselling is bookselling: the tune changes, but the dance remains the same.
