I know how impossibly brave it is to run a bookstore in this rudderless, readerless age. I applaud people for persisting with it. Booksellers are a conscience-poking rebuke of philistinism. And yet, and yet … to my shame, I hardly ever enter a bookstore unless somebody else drags me in.
Bookstore stress triggers:
☙ Self-hatred, about my own ignorance of writer’s names and whole divisions of human thought: theosophy, astronomy, archery, accounting, Antarctica, animal husbandry, systems analysis, sequins, Manga, orchids, forensics, and party-planning.
☙ Embarrassment, about how slowly I read and therefore how curtailed my reading has been over my lifetime.
☙ Bewilderment, when I can’t find my way around. This happens to me no matter how small the store is.
☙ Amnesia, trying to remember all the books I meant to seek out.
☙ Fear, of not finding what I want or, if I do find it, begrudging the cost.
☙ Disappointments, especially common in those bijou bookshops that only have one copy of no more than a hundred titles, “curated” for the color of their covers and how good they look facing outwards on the shelves. (Once though, strangely enough, I found just the thing I was looking for in a store like this, and was even praised for my choice by the bookseller. I still can’t figure that out. Was I unusually lucky, or were that store’s offerings dependent on genuine magical instinct? I’d hate to think there were algorithms involved.)
☙ Geriatric affronts, when they don’t have the children’s books I remember.
☙ Bruising encounters with bookstore staff. Some are so gruff, some suspicious, some are eager beavers, some are never off the phone. There used to be a great guy way down in the basement at my nearest branch of the Waterstone’s chain, who’d order anything for you and even discuss the book with you — in a non-threatening way — when you came to collect it. But he’s long gone. He probably went off in search of a living wage. (I just signed a group letter in support of Waterstone’s staff campaigning for an increase in salary, but it seems the only thing on the rise there is the gender pay gap.)
☙ Déjà vu, with all the usual suspects filling the shelves, as lurid as detergent packets: cookbooks, thrillers, bestsellers, sci-fi, exhaustive accounts of wild swimming; the same in their audio versions. A good bookshop should teach a little taste, not just load you down with genres and adultery advice.
☙ Disgust, finding books like The Lovely Bones or anything by John Grisham given pride of place and a personal recommendation handwritten by an overworked junior bookseller. While real novelists languish for want of a dime! In reality, though, fiction doesn’t sell. Cat books sell.
☙ Surprise, in realizing how prolific other writers are. Some people sure can pound these things out.
☙ A sudden sense of defeat, following such shocks. Feeling crushed, I start to plod, searching the shelves for unlovely bones.
I never feel too sure what I’m doing in a bookstore.
These are places for bookish people, people who can’t get enough of books — I have plenty of books at home that I haven’t read yet. Bibliophiles wallow in the smell of books, the look of books, the aura of books, the passive readiness of books to be found and bought and absorbed. Or collected, anyway. Books mean a lot to me, or they do in retrospect, but when confronted with a plateful, I take them with a pinch of salt.
Read more! Lucy Ellmann’s full essay on bookstore anxieties is available at our website.
These passages are drawn from the chapbook, “I Dated Graham Greene,” by Lucy Ellmann, hand-bound and printed on 70-pound Zephyr laid in a limited edition of 1,000 for Independent Bookstore Day by the Biblioasis Book Store and Publisher in Windsor, Ontario. Copyright © Lucy Ellmann
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