Alchemist or Dairymaid?

A couple of weeks ago, I quit my job. I’ve been, depending on how you think about it, unemployed or self-employed ever since.
I’m not very proud of this, but it’s true.
On leaving my job as a book buyer for a small, possibly-dying independent bookstore, I realized I had no idea what to do with my afternoon. It was about 1:30, and I suddenly realized, as I walked down the street, that I didn’t have anything planned for the time between 1:30 and the time when I would be expected to start making dinner (6:30 or so).
A normal person might have decided to walk to the movies, catch a matinee; I could have done that, or gone for a manicure, or decided to go to a salon and get all my hair chopped off. However, all those things cost money. And, since I was newly unemployed, it seemed foolish to spend money.
So I went to my local public library.
I browsed for a while, and found myself staring at the New Releases shelves, where I stumbled on a book that a bookish friend had urged me to read: Reluctant Capitalists, by Laura Miller. She’s a professor of something at Brandeis. The book’s about bookselling, independent bookselling vs. big chain bookselling, and why it, in the form we know it, is dying, and whether or not this is really something we should be worried about.
I borrowed the book (along with a few movies, no memory now of what they were) and decided to take the bus home so I could start reading it right away. On my way to the bus stop, which is about 100 feet from the library door, I passed an old customer of mine, a guy named Ken. “Hey!” he greeted me cheerfully. “Has anyone ever seen you without a book in your hand?”
Poignant.
I sat down at the bench at the bus stop and began to read. I was halfway through the book by the time I stopped to cook dinner, and I’d finished the book by the following afternoon. What a piece of work. It made me really angry, and it made me laugh out loud several times – I recognized myself on page after page, and the light was not often flattering – but mostly it made me feel useless.
Since leaving my job, I have truly felt without value, in a professional sense. I have twenty years of experience and god knows how much cultural knowledge stored in my head, but the fact is, this gets me nothing. No one will hire me because there is, apparently, no need in this modern world for someone like me. The world needs people who can do amazing things with Excel, it needs people who can build a house or fix a toilet, it needs people who can perform surgery and do accounting. I do none of these things. I have a weird set of skills which aren’t even exactly skills: it’s just stuff I know about, and things I can talk about and write about with almost anyone I could ever meet. But I can’t get paid for it anymore, it seems.
Which is, of course, why I’m sitting here at my computer writing about it. I mean, all the time in the world; I might as well write.
Miller’s book presents a really interesting perspective on bookselling today. She points out the obvious – something that I often pointed out to my customers – which is that bookstores are not meant to be non-profit organizations. When customers at the Anonymous Bookstore used to complain to me about the prices they paid for books, I would always say, “We charge the publishers’ list prices. We do not mark them up further.” When asked why we didn’t discount the books, I’d say honestly that if we discounted them, we’d be out of business soon. “This is a for-profit enterprise,” I’d tell them. And either they bought the book or they didn’t. I’d say that 95% of the time, they bought the book.
But it seems hard for customers to remember, or understand, sometimes, that bookstores are businesses same as everything else out there. Did my customers, who professed to admire me tremendously, who asked me for help every day, who sought me out personally when they needed help, did they understand how little I was being paid because the bookstore was dying and the owner wouldn’t make room for a raise? If these people thought I was happy working for so little because I loved my job so much, they were kidding themselves. I loved helping them most of the time, it’s true. But it would have been nice to’ve been paid a respectable hourly wage. A wage that indicated that someone understood the skills I had and what they would be worth to paying customers. A man was thrilled when I knew who Owen Wister was, a woman grabbed my hand in excitement when I knew who Queen Lucia was. Mothers faces melted with joy when I handed them David Greenberg and Victoria Chess’s book Slugs and said, “This is for your little boy. Trust me.” These books, these are special books, and I made these customers know they were special to me – at least for that moment – and I whored myself for this. For $12.00 an hour. Which is probably fine in some parts of the country but on the coast of Connecticut, let me tell you, $12/hr. doesn’t go far at all.
Laura Miller describes booksellers as reluctant capitalists. I’m not reluctant at all about it. I love making money. I love reeling in the customer, I love matching the right book with the right person, and I’m usually good at it. But it’s like Laurie Colwin said in one of her books – Goodbye Without Leaving-, I believe – when a character mourns the fact that she’s had great life experience but is basically unhireable for a normal job. “It’s like being an alchemist, or a dairymaid,” our heroine says. I can’t find where Colwin writes that, but it’s in there somewhere. Or at least it’s in one of her books. I didn’t make it up, that I know for sure.
Being a professional bookseller is like being an alchemist or a dairymaid.
I am grateful to Miller for having written her book; it was nice to feel recognizable, even if I was being recognized as a snot and a jerk and someone whose standards were completely insane and unrealistic. I actually emailed her, to thank her for writing the book and congratulating her on doing such a good job of it, and she wrote back to thank me and wish me luck in my future endeavors.
Which was nice of her.
But it’s strange, now. I’ve been unemployed for two weeks. And what have I done with my time?