Damaged Goods

The owner of a used bookshop where I once worked, remarked to me off-handedly one day that the business of selling books seemed to attract a disproportionate number of eccentrics. "Don't you find," she said, not much minding that she addressed someone in her employ, "most booksellers... odd?" I did not know if, in accepting this confidence, I was meant to be flattered and assume myself excluded from the observation, or if she meant to include herself as well as me. She said this, after all, in her own shop while a gray parrot named Emma waddled across her desk, eating pencils.

I don't know that we are all that odd, truly. Most of the booksellers I've known, and I've know many and met many hundreds more, were neither more nor less individual than bankers or bakers or bureaucrats. Most lead quiet lives, are productive within the scope of their duty, and go about their business just as other people do. The difference, even among these may be that they don't seem to mind so much as others might if the man in the next aisle over talks to himself, or the woman across the desk sings, quietly and to herself, as she types up an order or reads out an amusing passage without introduction from a book about reptiles. It is, I should think, then less a truism that booksellers are odd as a rule than that they are exceptional in accepting the eccentricities around them as unremarkable, and in finding more amusement than not in the unusual. As our jobs put us daily into conversation with interests not necessarily our own, and in contact with every conceivable kind of person, this seems not unnatural. How else should we be in work so crowded with the unexpected?

The best booksellers are adaptable; serving each customer according to his or her needs, more curious than most might be, of necessity, asking such questions as may help to sell a book. The larger the store and the more diverse the stock, the more necessary it becomes to have interests unlike one another, as a resource. Obviously, this uniformity of purpose, which might be found as easily among the clerks in a shoe shop or lawyers at a white-shoe-firm, requires, when it comes to books, more rather than less points of reference. That's all. I know nothing much of birds, for example, but work with people who know more. Likewise: sports, French critical theory, crochet, the baking of an apple or the making of a fishing-rod. The diversity of books would seem in the way of things to need a corresponding diversity of sellers. We may not meet every question with equal expertise -- though this is often surprisingly exactly what's expected, even by engineers and the like -- but we all of us are game for the chase.

But I am avoiding, I think, another point raised by the lady with the parrot. She not only asked me if I did not find most booksellers "odd" -- a point I think I've answered evenly enough above -- but she went on to say that she'd found most of those who worked in bookstores, at least in used books, as her own shop dealt all but exclusively in these, to be "damaged" in some way. She meant this kindly, I suppose, or at least without meanness, but it stung me a little on behalf of us all. I can see the sense in it now, as I only felt it then, and resented it. It was not nice to say so. It is an observation I might have made myself, looking in as from the outside, or in no further than from the proprietor's point of view; she had been raised in the trade, and married in it as well, but chose as much as was possible to raise her daughters away from it, hoping I should think that they might do better to project themselves into a less cluttered, dusty way of life, with a greater surety of happiness independent of auctions, estate sales and the sale and rescue of other people's discarded or bartered treasure. She dealt in damaged goods, as it were, and wanted new and "better" for her children. This was understandable, if a shallow reading of the worth of things, and of people. Her rather unfeeling characterization of the dealers in used books as themselves, in a parallel usually unmentioned even among ourselves, in some way likewise set aside, if only by ourselves, from the race for fortune and the kind of success best defined by a steady increase in income, was not wrong, I think. To appreciate that which has passed out of print, to pick up that which others have passed over, left behind or found they could do without, is an activity best suited perhaps to those who follow after rather than those that set trends, or value a thing for its freshness rather than its novelty, or admire most whatever is most admired at the moment. Ours is a backward trade. But "damaged" I think is the wrong word for those of us who slip out of the mainstream in this way. It suggests some failure to thrive in the wider, American culture, as opposed to the more mild movement away, and back, that is characteristic I think of the people who value used books. It is not some hurt that is to be healed in this way, some uncompensated failure that seeks consolation in older, now neglected ways or reading and being, but rather a persistence, admittedly conservative, in refusing to be bullied into unsuitable competition, a reflective, rather than propulsive character that is most often attracted to old books, quiet corners, and the reclamation of what would otherwise be lost.

As to the prevalence of crotchets and oddities of behavior among the few who would pursue a livelihood --admittedly a precarious one -- in this way, these I must concede as all too likely. I am myself no bad example. But damaged? I have no sense of that. I deny it. Battered, bumped, foxed, I will accept as evidenced by every mirror I pass. The appearance of anything, I would argue, does not always show its worth, and good booksellers, like good books, new and used, have more in them than might be best judged on first acquaintance.

I am not so pretty as the new books I sell, nor yet so loose in the hinges, hard to read and discolored as the used, but I am worth something more, I should think, for having acquired... character.