Once Upon a Tome: The Misadventures of a Rare Bookseller

by Oliver Darkshire

On the day of the interview, I was early – in the days before I became involved in books I frequently was.

didn’t have anything nice to say to other people then they should leave them alone.3 There are very few job positions open for a twenty-year-old with a bad attitude and no higher education, and unfortunately almost all of these involve dealing with the general public in one manner or another.

It’s probably the cosiness of a bookshop that leads people to treat it more like a second home, or a hotel, than a place of business.

You may only describe a book as Fine if it has recently nestled in the bosom of an angel, and a Good book might as well be on fire, because you’ve inadvertently just called it a dog’s breakfast.

Unlike other disciplines, book cataloguing is less an art, not really a science, and more of a completely unstandardized, decentralized carnival fire.

A customer hurried is easily lost but so is a customer given too long to make up their mind. Persuasion should be gentle and careful; and above all, finely timed.

13 I have long nursed a belief that people only really have room for one allconsuming hobby in their lives at a time. If you’re spending 24/7 in a dance studio, you’re not spending it in a basement scrounging about for old books, or knitting.

books are a form of art, and art was made to be perceived.

If you lock it away, and no one ever spends any time appreciating it, it’s still going to turn to dust like the rest of us.

All anyone can do is take reasonable precautions. Keep the books away from fire. Don’t throw them in a puddle. And remember to take delight in them.

To follow a path so peculiar, with so few opportunities, and with no real prospects for wealth or prestige, I think you have to have a fickle relationship with rationality.

It’s that feeling you get when you meet someone with whom you share a deep affinity, in my case someone who understood that (a) everything is a bother, and (b) sometimes the bother is absolutely worth it.

There’s never any question of whether a book is ‘appropriate’ – all books have something to teach us, but the nature of the lesson varies wildly.

However, if it looks like a goose, honks like a goose and steps like a goose, then it’s probably a Nazi, and there’s honestly only one kind of person who complains when I say ‘I don’t sell books to racists’, whatever they are calling themselves right now.

Purchasing a book for someone isn’t like running to the shop and picking up a box of decorative soaps, or a bottle of whisky. You can’t just take a stab in the dark and hope for the best. In the best-case scenario, a well-chosen book shows just how intimately you know a person, their interests, their politics . . . their very sense of self. In the worst case, it can show that you barely have any interest in who they are.

Hell hath no fury, they say, like a man treated the same way as he treats women.

My favourite remains a set of personalized bookplates, emblazoned with the motto ‘estne volumen in toga an solum tibi libet me videre’, which I believe translates roughly to ‘Is that a book in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?’

Increasingly, the modern customer expects us to maintain some kind of psychic control of a parcel once it leaves the shop. We are blamed for storms, criminally minded postmen, flat tyres, and a myriad of other logistical woes. I have become particularly adept at finding polite ways to say ‘that’s lovely, but ultimately we aren’t to blame for the fact that your home address is at the bottom of an active volcano’.

Social media is one of those skills that everyone thinks they’d like to be good at, until they realize that it actually just involves managing thousands of emotional strangers for twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

There’s something quintessentially human about the need to be around books, and in taking comfort in their presence.