Booksellers do not read all day

#40days40books entry 31

This entry is labeled #will someone ever write a bookseller I recognize

Because I have yet to watch a movie, and rarely to read a book that features a bookseller doing a job that I recognize as the job(s) I have had selling books. In point of fact, I've not see someone I know who sells books, either.

Aaliya Saleh of An Unnecessary Woman is the person I most recognize as a bookseller. She is compulsively surrounded by books and lives in them in a personal but distant way. She works hard and walks a ton. Her relationship to the written word is lively but not arrogant.

I tend to cringe at novels featuring booksellers. They tend to be emotionally deficient, reading all the time, and never seem to do much actual work. Books magically shelve themselves (?) and no one ever has to negotiate this ridiculous conversation: "Oh, I'd love to be a bookseller! Just to read all day, how wonderful!" the person says as you have just spent 10 minutes with them clearly not engaged in the act of reading.

Listen. It's a good job. The work is solidly demanding and fulfilling. Books are great and readers tend to speak a secret language to each other that is really wholesome for the introverts that bookstores tend to hire.

And we work. Boxes of books are heavy and must be lifted. Questions of shelving are thorny and must be answered.

Give me a television show about a community made of stores in a strip mall trying to get out of some edge of town hell-mouth and into a derelict building just off the town square - give me the weird politics and social justice issues of local economics. I want to see someone struggle with the decision to keep selling their crafts on-line or throwing in with other folks and setting up as a brick-and-mortar.

Put Kim Fields in charge of the city council, Alison Janney on whatever fence she chooses, and because she's (obvi) the cool garden shop lady, there are a bunch of folks who are waiting for her to make up her damn mind until bffs Traci Ellis-Ross (architect) and Sandra Oh (ecologist) have coffee with bookstore owner and over-worked genius Andrea Navedo whereat they all pick their flags and their sides and Season One ends with a City Council meeting after the old building has been acquired and the city has decided to back the rehab. Season Two is all about the contractors and Season Three follows the first year of residence. Through it all are conversations between folks about the need to shop locally, how to run a business, how to be friends in business with each other. We see mistakes and learning and specificity and loss and the booksellers shelve books. They take inventory. They struggle with figuring out how to deal with a shoplifter in the strip mall. They learn new layouts of stores. They find themselves in constant combat with publishers and distributors and do-gooder community members. You know. Like real damn people living in a world whose global online economy is turning into a malignant tumor.

I know that there was a time when bookselling was not the same as working retail. I know that there are bookstores where that is, in many ways, still true. But that is not my experience and it is not the experience of many people of my acquaintance. If we took the gentility out of the expectation, I think, maybe, our stories could be vital rather than reassuringly old-fashioned.

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