(Wantlist #17, [early 1987?])
In the old days, when one Gypsy wanted to put a curse on another Gypsy, one perhaps who had stole his horse or who had been seduced by his daughter, he didn’t say “Drop Dead!” or “Break a leg!” or “I hope you get arthritis!” — he said: “May you own a house!” Now that Gypsies go to school and become educated to the blessings of Civilization As We Know It, they can find a curse far more immobilizing. They say: “May you own a second hand bookstore!” — defeated by life, disdained by society, disowned by family and friends, despised by bankers and auctioneers, and heavily overstretched with merchandise, not only in your place of business, but in every room of your domicile; merchandise, moreover, hopelessly negotiable by anyone but yourself.
How can your visiting friend know that the paperback he casually flipped off the chair is worth a pound of jumbo shrimp, or that the pamphlet he rests his highball on to avoid staining a $10 table is good for steak dinner for two at the best restaurant in town? Or that the book he casually borrows cost you the first opportunity to sell it in fifteen years? No one but you knows how to turn these obscure, heterogeneous, miscellaneous bundles of paper into cash; what you are selling with each book (when you sell it!) is your insight and your experience. Few people are willing to buy that, and those that are willing, most often can’t.
“What a wonderful stock of books you have,” they tell you as they walk out, “and very fair prices, too.”
Why the hell don’t you buy some of them, then? you mutter inaudibly, which comes out like “Thank you, I’m glad to find someone who appreciates them.”
“Yes,” they sigh, “I wish I could afford to buy books. I love books.”
Yeah, they love books. Some people love books so much they will spend 3 or 4 hours examining every book in the store while you fret, fume, stare and glare — unable to read, unable to think, and unable to concentrate on the AB. Suddenly they look at their watches. “My God, three o’clock!” they exclaim as they make a mad dash for the door. “I’ll come back when I have more time,” they assure you with a wan smile and a friendly wave.
“Yeah,” you mutter, sometimes not so inaudibly, “just make sure I have more time when you do.”
Occasionally they will come in pairs and read titles to each other. “The Magic MOUNtain!” “GONE with the WIND!” “Of Human BONDage!” Wow!
After about two hours of this, she sees a book she REALLY wants. “The FEEmale YOUnick! Oh, I gotta have this! Got any money?”
Of course he doesn’t have any money. If he had money would he be going around with a gimp like this? “Nah, I only have about two dollars,” She throws you a seductive look promising unutterable delights if you will let her have it for two, but her blandishments are about as effective as a full-scale Libyan invasion of Israel. Your stern visage says: “Five it is marked, and seven-fifty it is, including city sales tax, federal excise tax, and a two dollar Reading-Titles-Out-Loud tax.”
“Hold it for me,” she pleads as she hands it to you. “I’ll be back tomorrow.” They are no sooner out the door than you put it back on the shelf (if you can find the hole it came from). She’ll be back for it — sure she will — when the Brooklyn Dodgers come back to Ebbets Field.
Blissfully unaware of these and other exciting experiences that awaited me, I had a strong, satisfying feeling that my gypsy days were over when I handed Sam $2500 at the end of Want List #16.
The next day I walked leisurely from my furnished room to my new bookshop. In the excitement, Sam had neglected to give me the keys, but he was already there and he greeted me with a grunt.
In deference to my new status as owner, he pointed out to me the various sections — the Sports Section, the Poetry Section, the Americana Section (about which he was particularly emphatic), and the many other sections that comprise a miscellaneous second hand bookstore. It all looked rather jumbled and higgledy-piggledy to me, and actually it was, because Sam knew every book in the store and where to find it, but he didn’t care if anyone else knew or not. In Sam’s store, if you wanted a certain book, you had to find it by divination or serendipitous searching, although occasionally he would deign to thumb you in the general direction.
Sam taught me a lot. He taught me about the Antiquarian Bookman and the other want lists, and how to quote books from them.á (Double your marked price and add 50 cents for postage, but always say postpaid). He taught me how to buy books from people who brought them into the shop. (Go through them very quickly, put every fifth or sixth book in a neat pile, and throw the others back into the box, the bag, or on the floor nearby. Place your left hand on the neat pile and look up at the ceiling where the appropriate offer is clearly written, but invisible to everyone but yourself. Divide that number in half, whatever it is (say $10), and bark out quickly, “I’ll give you $5.00 for these. The rest I don’t want at any price.”
The seller looks wearily, not at the small number of books you picked out, but at the large stack he has to lug back where they came from. “Gimme six and take them all,” he says disconsolately. You make a wry face, blow a lot of air from your puffed cheeks, look at the floor and scratch your head vigorously for several minutes. With a weary shrug, you go through all your pockets, find four wrinkled dollar bills, and count out two dollars in dimes, nickels and pennies, which you pour into the seller’s cupped hands. As soon as he leaves, you snatch a book from the discard pile, mark it $12.50 and put it on the shelf. The others, including the ones from the neat pile, you pile precariously on top of precarious piles already on the floor, and go back to what you were doing before the annoying interruption (if you can remember what it was).
Sam also taught me about catalogs and showed me some that he had made years before when he had his books in a loft and undisturbed by customers wandering in and out of the store. “This is where the money is,” he pronounced emphatically, slapping the open catalog smartly with the back of his left hand, “The retail business ain’t worth the powder to blow it to hell.”
I also learned some smart answers to dumb questions. A woman walked in from the bright light outside and as her eyes adjusted to the darkness I could see she was overwhelmed by the vast quantities of books and the wild disarray. Since I was sitting by the door, she directed her perfectly logical question to me. “If I asked you for a certain book, would you know if you had it?”
“Nah,” Sam answered for me from the back of the shop, “I jis started woikin’ here yestidday.” Which was true, of course, and I thought Sam was very clever, because I hadn’t yet gotten used to the idea that it was my shop and San just cost me a sale if not a good customer.
A few days later a man walked in and gingerly made his way around the piles, examining the shelves with some bewilderment.á “Are your books in any order?” he asked politely, again a perfectly logical question in the circumstances. I hesitated, because I really didn’t know, but once again Sam came to my rescue. “What are you looking for?” he asked with mock servility.
“Oh, nothing in particular,” the gentleman responded amiably. “Then what difference does it make if they’re in order or not,” snarled Sam.
Another customer shot to hell, I mused ruefully, and since he was the first person to walk into the shop in two days, and my total receipts for five days of ownership amounted to less than $20, I was losing my sense of humor. Nonetheless, I absorbed Sam’s ideas and attitudes like a child absorbs his religion and his political ideology from his mother’s milk and his father’s inane pronouncements, and they have remained with me, with some minor modifications, to this very day.
I should say that when someone really knew and cared about books, and there were a few, Sam was polite and helpful, generous with his time and as liberal with discounts for my books as he would have been with his own. He was especially generous to young people who obviously did not have much money to spend.
During my brief apprenticeship and for a long time afterward, I felt exceedingly hostile toward his arrogance, but I see now that he was an essentially kind person who could not suffer gladly folly, ignorance or cunning, and for that trait he had, and still has, my grudging admiration.
Sam always opened the shop very early in the morning. I think now because it was the only time of day he could really count on being undisturbed. After about a week or ten days of ownership, he entrusted me with the keys, saying he had some business to attend to the following morning. He came in about noon, and left in the middle of the afternoon, suggesting delicately that I could close whenever I felt like it. The next morning, and for five or six mornings afterward, no matter how early I arrived at the shop, he was sitting on the steps waiting for me.
Sam was a little more tolerant of me now that I had the keys, and as we went through the stock together Sam would point out the “really good” books and price them, although I had no idea why they were “really good”, nor did he vouchsafe any explanations. Some of them were so good they had to be put in the “back room” which already was filled to capacity with “really good” books as well as some rudimentary toilet facilities.
I was beginning to feel guilty about making Sam wait for me every morning. One blazing hot morning in the middle of August I arose from a fitful slumber at 7 AM and staggered through the deserted streets to my bookshop. I did it! I beat Sam! I went to a nearby luncheonette for a cup of coffee and a Danish and bought a newspaper. I was gone maybe 20 minutes, still no Sam. I read the newspaper, sports pages and all — still no Sam. My usual arrival time passed, still no Sam. I browsed around (as the expression goes) in my bookshop for an hour or so, looking for something to read, finally selecting “Gaudy Night” by Dorothy Sayers. I read in the shop for an hour or two, then sat on the steps and read for a while, then took my chair outside and read some more, undisturbed by rumbling trucks or children playing in the street, and uninterrupted by the telephone, by customers, by Sam, or by anything else. This was the first, last and only time I ever read a book in a bookstore for more than an hour at a time. By the time I finished the book it was late afternoon, and I had a sinking but exhilarating feeling that Sam was never coming back.
I closed the store, went into an air-conditioned movie theater, and, oblivious to the flickering screen, started thinking long and hard about how I was going to spend the next day, my first full free day. I knew what I had to do in the morning. I was going to wash and dress the windows, get all the books off the floor and sweep it, organize the books into sections, alphabetize and price them, and dress all the shelves. But what would I do in the afternoon? Read another book maybe, or go through the AB now that I could find every book quickly and easily. In my mind the shop already looked like Brentanos.
The reality, of course, was something different. It was easy enough to take the books off the floor, and off the desk, and off the counter, and off the typewriter, and off the chair and off the toilet seat — the only question was, where to put them? In some stores you can build up, but I was in kind of a half-basement in which you could touch the ceiling by standing on tiptoe, and every section of shelving went right up to it. All the shelves, high and low, were already loaded far beyond capacity with books jammed in every which way. I looked at the books on the floor and thought that many of them should be on the shelves, which meant, of course, that some of the books on the shelves had to be on the floor. At last I had some insight into Sam’s frantic activity.
I took a few books off the shelves and put a few books on the shelves, pricing them according to weight, thickness and whether I thought they were worth reading. In the pile I was working on, I came across two big thick volumes called “Siberia and the Exile System.” I didn’t suppose there was much interest in that, but I figured it should be good for at least $5, considering its size and weight. I opened the cover to see if Sam had priced it, and found $1.80 in big thick red crayon on the flyleaf. Same with the other volume. That must be what Sam paid for it (stupid!) What should I do about that $1.80? Tear out the flyleaves? That didn’t seem right. I didn’t know yet about using fine sandpaper, or pasting the endpapers down to the pastedowns. I stared at it for a long time, then put it in the back room.
By lunchtime I began to be aware that I was never going to fit 6000 books onto shelves built for 2000 that already had 4000, and fell into a depression from which I never really recovered.
One thing I did resolve. I never would buy any more books until I sold a good portion of what I had. Even when I did buy books, I would buy only the quantity I sold: that is, if I sold 50 books in any given week, I would buy 50 and no more. I was absolutely inflexible about this, and stuck to that policy firmly and resolutely for very nearly 24 hours.
End of Want List #17