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?

Bookselling in a New England College Town

Having written about being in the service industry (see entry below), I find myself needing to explain something about this.
I am now 36 years old; I've been working in retail, one way or another, since I was 16. That's, yes, twenty years. (I'm bad at math, but good at remembering my life.) For most of those years I've been a bookseller in this college town where I live now. I've mostly been very content with this; I like the overwhelming majority of my customers, I love the books; I find some obscure pride in knowing that I'm one of those people who can sometimes connect someone with a book that really makes them happy, or helps them, or does something good for them. A book is often a better friend than a friend is. That's not a nice thing to say, I realize, but I do mean it.
So I'm very sad to report to anyone who cares, which I assume is pretty much nobody, that I've left my position as book buyer at the small independent bookstore here, the local institution where the overly degreed hang out and massage each other's egos.
I didn't leave because I have a better offer. I've left even though I've not even got one job interview lined up. You may ask, "Why? Didn't you really really want that $12/hr job you had that seems so unbelievably cool?" The answer is, If I'd been treated differently by my employers, I might. If I'd felt I was getting an ounce of professional respect from the people I work for, I would probably stay. If I'd had an office; a phone in said office; a proper email address; a filing cabinet, for Christ's sake; if I'd had a professional salary and real health care and more than 10 days vacation per year. I might have stayed.
But I didn't have, and I didn't stay.
I am tired of fighting this good fight. I believe in independent bookstores; I believe that Barnes and Noble really does dumb down the cultural dialogue which happens in bookstores and because of bookstores across this country. I believe that Borders isn't that much better.
But I also believe that I'm burnt out. I used to work in rare books, and it was, compared to this, a cakewalk. With used books, you never have to plan author events. I never had to worry about publicity -- I never got emails saying "Appearing on Live! With Regis --" and then had to think, "Do I want to order this idiotic self-help book?" Back in the days when I worked in used books, I frequently said to customers, If I have my way I'll never sell another self-help book again as long as I live.
For the past two years, I've kept self-help to a minimum in this store -- and, to the store's credit, we really didn't have too many customers looking for this shit -- but you know what? It's too much. I do not enjoy what bookselling is, now. It's not the same business that it was when I was 18. There have always been bad books, sure; but I didn't used to have to pay attention to them. I didn't have to order them. At this job, I did. Now I had to feel responsible for getting this shit into people's hands. People who I regard as friends, god help me, they're in publishing and they thrust ARCs into my hands and say, "You must order this for the store, they'll love it." Well, listen, my friends: my customers didn't love it. No one asked me about any of the books I've ordered because I was cowed and ordered the crap you publish. I've had to return all those books. You probably didn't notice.
I've tried to sell the mediocrity that gets the hype. I tried to sell Jenna Jameson. No one cared. I tried to sell Ann Coulter. No one cared. I tried to sell Michael Savage. No one cared. All these books were or will be returned. Robert Parker; James Patterson (god! all those James Patterson books I will never have to think about again! I practically want to open a bottle of Champagne to celebrate). All of this proved to me, over and over again, that you, my friends in publishing, and your reps never had any idea what the hell was going in in this little bookstore I worked at.
Sex sells, sure. But not just any sex. And mean nasty funniness sells. But not just anyone's mean nasty funniness.

I took this job two years ago as an act of desperation: I wanted a job that would give me minimal pay and offer me and The Most Ethical Man in the World health coverage. Two years have gone by. I have no raise. My Christmas bonuses were jokes. The Most Ethical Man in the World has a job which offers medical care that's a zillion times better (I was never able to find a local gynecologist on my job's plan). He hates the job; it leaves him drained and angry and depressed every day. But it's still a better job, in conventional regards, than any job I've ever had. And in two years, he hasn't come up with a preferable Plan B for himself.
I feel like I've basically wasted two years. It's a sad feeling.
I'm going to work toward going back to the books I love: used and rare. There's not much money for me to make doing this, I realize, but it will be, I think, a purer enterprise for me. It will allow me to be truer to what I want to do with my time; it will allow me to focus on the things I love. I hope to God I'll be able to make a little money doing it.
To my customers, who will I'm sure never read this: stop me on the street and say hello. I really like you guys. I just couldn't take working for the Fearless Leader anymore.