The Used Bookshop Stories

Opening the Shop

At fifteen I graduated from sweeping up the painted wooden floorboards and neatening the stock on the erratic, slapped-together wooden shelves and running to Steve’s Restaurant for cups of coffee (“light”, in paper cups with the Parthenon on the side) and corn muffins scorched on the grill to opening the shop by myself. Saturday and Sunday mornings on Atlantic Avenue, in the little bookstore next to Kalfian Carpets and across the street from the tire shop, nothing doing here – our eccentric little bookshop was twenty or thirty years too early for gentrification, if it ever stood a chance. Come to think of it, there still isn’t a used bookstore on Atlantic Avenue .

Michael didn’t really like to get up in the morning and as the months went by he liked less and less to preside over the empty store. I was his solution, the local kid who’d be thrilled just to get credit with adults for “working” when what I was really doing was reading, puttering in the stacks, playing God of Books in this almost wholly private realm. I’d take home my “pay” in books alone, was always gathering a stack of goods in the back corridor that I’d shift into my knapsack when I’d earned them. And behind a glass-fronted case were our rare books, including a couple I coveted and saved months to earn: Henry Miller’s and Michael Fraenkel’s Hamlet with a red-ribbon binding and uncut pages, and an autographed copy of Bernard Wolfe’s mysterious Limbo. (I still own the Wolfe, but can’t recall where and when I let go of the Miller-Fraenkel.)

I’d roll up the gate at eleven (having bought myself not coffee but tea and the grilled corn muffin from Steve’s), pull the cart of stealable cheapo books to the sidewalk in front of the window, and plant myself at the old wooden desk to the right of the door – a sentry position, against the risk of thievery – waiting for the first customer of the day, sometimes an hour before anyone wandered in. The place had no heat, and in cold months I’d be in scarf and hat, rubbing gloved fingers together, waiting for the sun to hit the window and warm the storefront. We kept change in a cigar box in the top drawer, and the only time I ever left the desk for even a minute the box was scooped clean by some clever bandit, my fault, but Michael knew thievery was the neighborhood’s nature, and just shook his head. It counted not against me, but against him sticking around Brooklyn, and soon enough the little shop moved up to a basement storefront on East 80 th Street in Manhattan – half the size of the Atlantic Avenue storefront, and a hundred times more viable.

 

 

Paloma Picasso

My roommate was the night man at the shop on Broadway and 80 th, a high narrow shop with a central staircase to a rare book level upstairs, and used records in a bin beneath the stairs. I was the night-man’s backup, closing the place alone on Friday and Sunday nights. The store buzzed between seven and ten on weekend nights, full of couples strolling after movies or dinner, the cash register whirring. The last hour, eleven to midnight , was pretty dead, especially on a Sunday. This night, reading as usual at the counter, I was alone there apart from a long-necked beauty in haute couture who amassed a mighty pile of art and photo books, making several trips up to the counter to drop off her accumulation, then returning to her browsing. I grew mildly curious as the expensive pile swelled, feeling a faint sexy complicity between us. Then, as in a television commercial famous at the time, she revealed her identity to me wordlessly, by paying with a credit card.

 

Chris Butler

The hole-on-the-wall used bookshop on Bergen Street lasted probably about six months, and when the owners, a sultry hippie couple (I had a crush on her) decided to close it, I considered buying the shop and living in it as my apartment, in order to make it, and life in New York, affordable. I imagined myself sitting in the open shop all day, writing – it was certainly quiet enough in there. Instead I moved to California , where I’d live for a decade after. The shop, barely bigger than a walk-in closet, became a video store, then a hot dog stand.

My two memories of the long empty afternoons there: I was at the counter there listening to WBAI the day that Philly Joe Jones, the great jazz drummer, had died. Bizarrely, another great jazz drummer, named Johnny Joe Jones, died within the same twenty-four hours. The disc jockey played examples of the music of both “Joe Joneses”, his tone soberly memorial, never dwelling on the absurd coincidence of their names. I’d not heard of either man before that day.

And: one day Chris Butler, the songwriter-auteur of The Waitresses, came into the shop and struck up a conversation. I don’t know how it was he revealed himself to me, but I must have been gregarious – desperate, really, for the kind of hipster customer he appeared to be.

 

Imperious Memoirist

An imperious middle-aged memoirist came into the store on Solano Avenue in Berkeley one afternoon. This was a vast commercial space, four used-book-lined walls stretching into a deep storefront full of tables of remainders and new books, bins of used records, and a long magazine rack high enough that it required a mirror for us to patrol shoplifters. Four or five of us manned the floor at any given time, usually two of us at the counter behind the registers.

She had a train of courtiers with her – reverential local guides, perhaps a literary escort or two. They asked us whether we had any of her books. The staff began to find their sense of privilege funny; mere clerks drawing pay, the store nonetheless belonged to us, and we judged those who entered our space. One of us spoke rudely to the imperious memoirist. The phrase “do you know who you’re talking to?” was uttered on her behalf.

It was at this same store that we had to fend off persistent inquiries by spies for ASCAP, men and women who carried clipboards and dressed like Mormons. They wanted us to pay performance royalties on the used records we borrowed from the store’s bins and played on the turntable behind the counter. The music was of course audible throughout the store, but we argued with straight faces that it was for the private enjoyment of the clerks, and, further, that the customers usually only complained about the music, which was true. When they’d leave we’d titter behind our hands, amazed at the impoverished lives of bureaucratic stiffs.

 

Lovecraft In the Basement

The store on Livingston Street in Brooklyn had been in operation since some time in the 30’s or early 40’s, no one was sure – it had been taken over by our present boss some time in the ‘70’s, and he was a man who hated books. The place was a ramshackle disaster – ancient books of neglected quality layered behind decades of dubious acquisitions. Our boss offset the uncertainties – and, to him, the mysteries – of the used-book trade by offering new editions of the bible, books on dream-interpretation and guides to Civil Service Tests (some guys came in and bought the test book for “Fireman” and then after they failed, switched to “Sanitation Worker” or “Jail Guard”), and crates of used copies of Playboy and Penthouse. The store was deep and high and narrow, with ladders to reach the obscure stuff fifteen or twenty feet in the air. It also had a rank and moldy basement, at all times kept locked, and rumored to be full of the treasures left behind by the former owners, including a large collection of rare books acquired from the estate of H.P. Lovecraft.

The boss hired clerks who knew more about books than he did – he couldn’t help that – and then distrusted them, fearing that they’d gather items of neglected value and ferret them from the store, out from under his nose. We would. He had strict and absurd policies in place: no employee was allowed to buy more than two books a week, even at full face value. This forced me to use friends as shills: they’d come in, pretending not to know me, and I’d put items in their hands that I wished them to buy for me. We were also strictly forbidden to linger in the basement for more than a minute or two. The boss would send us down there for a specific item – light bulbs or a box of paper bags, not books – and then nervously wring his hands and, if we took too long, begin yelling. He feared we were trying to excavate treasure from the labyrinthine, impossible dark shelves in the basement – books whose value he could only guess at, but we might know. We were. He never left us alone in the store, not for more than a few minutes.

One morning another clerk and I (the same guy who became my roommate, and the night man at the Broadway store) got up at seven in the morning and used our keys to get inside the store and explore the basement privately and thoroughly, before opening hours and the boss’s arrival. For our efforts we found maybe five or six items of interest, nothing special, and certainly no sign of the Lovecraft hoard. We each quit the store within a few weeks.

 

Conlon Nancarrow

A stooped and frail man with an elegant goatee browsed the record bins at the Solano store, guided deferentially by a local fellow we knew as a slightly preening, semi-famous experimental musician. When with trembling hand the elder man filled out a check to pay for the records he’d picked out, the name on the check was Conlon Nancarrow, the legendary exiled avant-gardist, who’d spent decades in Mexico punching out player piano rolls, composing music too rapid for any human performer. I exclaimed at meeting him, and called our record buyer out of his hiding place in the back of the store. We luckily had a supply of Conlon Nancarrow LPs, a remainder item, and he signed their jackets for us with a silver marker.

 

Book Thieves

Word circulated among the several Berkeley stores: a ring of book thieves was plundering expensive art books and reselling them, a quick and easy racket. Our books had been identified by other clerks at other stores – and we’d been accidentally guilty of buying stock filched from our neighbor stores. The description of the thieves went out – seedy, eccentric, and gay – and we clerks at the Solano Avenue store put ourselves on high alert.

Soon enough came the day when they were detected in the store, three of them, two men and a woman, idling in the back aisles. We quietly assembled a posse of four or five clerks and, buzzing on our own outrage and adrenaline, asked them to step into the back of the store. Caught, the thieves glumly unloaded six or seven coffee-table books from under jackets and inside satchels, an astounding and brazen volume of material. We confronted them stammeringly, made insensate with fury: how could anyone Bohemian, anyone who valued books, force us clerks into the role of cops? Wasn’t that a breach of some bargain? Better if the book-thieves had looked like the ASCAP Mormons. These thieves were awkward mirrors for ourselves, gormless, shaggy, hip – clerklike. We banished them and congratulated ourselves uneasily. I’ve never worked in a bookstore where the clerks didn’t sometimes help themselves to the books, where we didn’t feel that the wares belonged more to us than to the paying customers. And one of the best and purest and most dedicated clerks I ever worked with later ended up in a federal prison, convicted of rescuing de-accessioned antiquarian books and papers from a university library with what a judge considered excessive zeal.

 

Eldridge Cleaver, Greg Bear, Joseph McBride

At another Berkeley store – the grandest, in the middle of the campus strip on Telegraph Avenue, a four-story palace created in the ’60’s by one of the legends of Californian used-bookselling – famous faces among the clientele were nothing terribly special. The store tended to attract any visitor to the campus, notable scholars who’d lose themselves in the deep third-floor humanities sections, while the rare-book room and art-bookshop on the top floor was host to a stream of artists, photographers, and elite collectors. We were famous ourselves, in a way, famous for our clerkly arrogance. In friendly California, we dared to sniff and snap like New York bookstore clerks. Our totemic founding father was still present in the store, usually at the front counter, looming like some kind of Pere Ubu, spitting cigar-flavored droplets as he frowned and swore at the inferior wares offered to him at the store’s buying counter, eating dim sum with his stained fingers and wearing hot sauce on his chin and collar for the rest of the afternoon. Among the rather desperate Bay Area characters who would regularly appear with a few miserable books to try to sell to the store was Eldridge Cleaver, in the last years before his death. When his books were rejected, Cleaver would only mumble and lower his eyes, wholly stripped of pride.

One quiet day the science fiction writer Greg Bear, a large and kingly man, and at that time the president of the Science Fiction Writers of America, came to the counter to make a purchase. I recognized him, as usual, from his name on his credit card. Feeling sly, I told him that I was in fact a dues-paying member of his organization – I had at that time sold three or four stories to science fiction magazines, but there was no chance he would know my name. At that Greg Bear widened his eyes and threw his arms open, seemingly recipient of a kind of Socialist epiphany: little men everywhere, even the clerk at a bookstore he’d wandered into, could be encompassed in Science Fiction’s populist legions.

Another night, working alone at that counter on a Friday, a bearded man descended from the third floor, in the company of a woman. They’d been browsing the film section, and now presented a Paloma-Picassoesque stack of out-of-print film books. The man’s checkbook revealed him as Joseph McBride, biographer of John Ford, Orson Welles, and Frank Capra, a man I knew had spent long afternoons talking and hanging out on-set with Welles and Howard Hawks, among others. I blurted out: “Are you the Joseph McBride?” Before McBride could reply to me, the woman raised her eyebrows and deadpanned perfectly: “That’s the first time I’ve ever heard anyone put it quite that way.”

 

Closing the Shop

Closing the shop on Telegraph was a lot of work. We’d have to visit each of the four floors and mezzanine – did I mention the mezzanine? That place was a kind of stadium – and flush out the recalcitrant browsers and homeless people who’d lodged in the store for the evening, ignoring our warning shouts up the stairwell that we were about to close. Eventually we’d switch off the banks of lights, one at a time, in a sequence of illumination designed to chase people toward the exits, like the exit lights along the floor of an airplane. Invariably, we’d get guff from people who’d make a kind of home in one section or another, and felt outraged to be informed that it was in fact a bookstore, and that it was closing. One night a man in the grip of rage at being exiled from the third floor called me an “effete rich boy” when I turned off the lights on him (I had long hair at that time). The insult was such a non-sequitur – I was a clerk! – that I found myself laughing. But I understood later what he’d reached for in his inchoate slur was a version of the same class defiance that clerks themselves felt: the bookstore belongs to me, because I love it more than you.

Closing on Solano Avenue , a suburban quadrant of Berkeley , was more peaceful. I’d make the announcement – “We’re closing in five minutes” – and then drop the needle on side two of Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home, which begins with the words: “You must leave now, take what you have, you think will last/But whatever you wish to keep you’d better grab it fast…”