Once Upon a Tome: The Misadventures of a Rare Bookseller

by Oliver Darkshire

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

The Suited Gentlemen turn up annually, smartly dressed in matching suits and asking to see any material we have on Ayn Rand. Faces usually obscured by large dark glasses, they move without making a sound, and only travel in pairs. Sometimes they will bark out a laugh at nothing in particular, as if mimicking what they think humans do.

I suspect they consider me as much of a barrier to the enjoyment of the bookshop as I consider them a terrifying esoteric encounter.

There comes a point where a book isn’t worth anything, and you can’t save it. You need to throw it away, or recycle it, or (if you have the space) keep it for your own amusement. When I tell people this, they often clutch their pearls and look at me as if I’d suggested we tear down Stonehenge to make way for a supermarket, but the reality of the matter is that a Rare Book Industry survives only because most old books are not worth any money. The nature of our trade is such that the vast majority of antiquarian books aren’t worth keeping from a purely financial standpoint. So to make any headway in the book trade, you develop a hard skin early and learn not to listen to the plaintive cries of books as you box them up and donate them to second-hand or charity bookshops.

psa: they don't want them either. source: former employment (also libraries)

The thing about answering a phone in a bookshop is that if you make the mistake of greeting anyone with anything less than breezy neutrality, the person on the other end invariably decides to make you pay for it.

I’m running late, for no good reason whatsoever, and I speedwalk down Piccadilly at the velocity to which a gay man in the capital city is accustomed.

All this is worth keeping in mind, but I think one has to be guided by the cardinal rule which supersedes all others: one does not sell books to Nazis.

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.

We are connected to the world by a thousand invisible strings, and each time we make sure a book on something unpleasant gets to the right place, or we block a homophobe from shopping with us, it’s a tiny step in the right direction.

IN THE QUEER COMMUNITY, there’s a saying that you never really stop coming out of the closet. This is as true in a rare bookshop as it is anywhere else, though the extra cupboard space is often useful for storing books. It’s not that I didn’t trust my new colleagues, you understand, but you don’t last long as a gay book-loving nerd in this world without learning to conceal it from strangers until you’re quite certain how they will react.

To my mind, the solution was (and remains) simple. Social media is like a cat: it can tell if you’re only pretending to like it, and it will claw you. If you’re afraid of it, because you’re afraid of seeming like you don’t know what you’re doing, then you’re missing the point, which is that the entire platform is thousands of people all desperate to acknowledge that they have no idea what they are doing, revelling in the fact that expertise is just the end result of a long series of mistakes.

There’s a dissonance between how a certain kind of person treats retail workers, and how they treat people they perceive as experts, and in a bookshop people tend to flicker confusingly between the two as if they aren’t really sure whether they should keep being rude to you, or if you should start being rude to them instead.

People react very strangely to the idea that you might ever throw out a book, and as a rare bookseller you have to walk a strange line. On the one hand, your entire trade is based on the fact that some books are more important than others, and you have to make calls every single day about which ones to put a price label on and which ones to ignore. On the other hand you have people out there organizing smell tours of London who, if you act like you might need to do the sensible thing and recycle a book which you couldn’t pay someone to take away, treat you like you’ve confessed to a long career of vandalism. They do not, at any point in their diatribe, offer to take the book off your hands.