For the better part of 2006, while studying for a master’s degree, I worked part-time in a branch of Waterstone’s, in *REDACTED*, the county capital of *REDACTED*.
I got the interview by stating openly in my covering letter that I was 24, still living with my mum, and asking her for train-fare had become a bit undignified. This seemed encouraging. But then the panel (2 pax.) asked what I was reading currently, and I said Sam Harris’s The End of Faith, and there was awkward silence. This set the tone for almost every “literary” chat thereafter.
Call me an idiot, but I was genuinely stunned to find we weren’t allowed to read on the job. Instead, booksellers had to devote any time not spent actually dealing with customers (which on a rainy weekend, in the wrong bit of the shop, could be a lot) with often-fruitless searches for books which had been lost, mis-shelved, or maybe stolen, or because they had to be returned to publishers (another surprise), and at the publisher’s expense.
I also quickly realised that the layout of the shop was not an accident (even in the jury-rigged “commercial” buildings of many an English town centre), and that the unadvertised steering of a customer around a bookshop was near-identical to how the algorithms work in the online equivalents (or vice versa, probably). If you like Poetry, you’re more likely to also like Philosophy, (right here on the next set of shelves), or Music (by the window), or History books (just across the room there), than if you came in looking for the latest Jeffrey Archer novel (downstairs, on the pile-’em-high islands).
Most of the time, I was just moving “stock” about, taking maddening credit card orders over the phone, or walking people literally to alphabetised mass-market fiction. All of which required no interest in, let alone knowledge of, literature. To a middle-class nerd such as myself, discovering that working in a bookshop [cue poetic images of James Frain, or similar] was fundamentally no different from working in a Sports Direct or Tesco was about the most depressing thing imaginable. That, and waiting for the Sunday trains in winter.
A.S.H. Smyth, “Seven kinds of people you find in bookshops”, The Critic, 2020-11-14.
February 19, 2021
QotD: The disillusionment of working in a bookshop
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