For Sunday Date-Day today, Marla and I watched – through Salem Cinema (Salem, OR) (support local businesses, please) – an incredible documentary, “The Booksellers.” This is the second documentary we’ve watching through Salem Cinema this way (the fungi movie was incredible, too), and it’s probably the easiest way to do something we would do anyway (watch a Sunday afternoon movie), and support a business we both really care about. Plus, it was fun to try and see if you could spot Obadiah or Kat in the background.
I grew up in bookstores. My mom and her first girlfriend opened a store called, “a.k.a. Used Books & Records,” in Cottage Grove when I was in middle school, and outside of mowing lawns and stuff like that, it was my first real job, where I got paid. (I usually opted to get more money in trade, if I’m honest.) In her store, she sold used records (her bag) and used books (her girlfriend’s bag), and they also sold comics (a mutual bag, as it were).
All of my life-long interests were earned as a kid working in that shop. Book nerds and metalheads would come in, while I was listening to George Carlin records and reading Green Lantern comics. I think about that job fairly often, not only because I still come across records in my collection with the “a.k.a.” sticker in the corner (in my mom’s handwriting), but because it was a formative experience, and it immediately enamored me with bookish people, and their ilk.
My first girlfriend was the daughter of the librarian in my hometown. My first non-fast food job was working for B. Dalton, which is how old THAT story is. I loved that job more than anything, and while my urge to move to Portland – and on to Barnes & Noble – should have telegraphed to me that maybe I was straying a little too far from the path, I couldn’t believe that I was lucky enough to run the stockroom on Broadway, and later, the music department at Lloyd Center, at a bookstore in a huge city I loved.
Sure, it wasn’t Powell’s. But, you know. I was close, right? As long as there were books around.
Barnes & Noble hired a brand new manager one day, after I’d been with the company for well over six years, who then went and systematically fired everyone who had been with the company for five or more years. The joke was on her, as they went on to fire her afterwards. All done as a cost saving measure. Which was probably a good thing, as this was just at the beginning of digital books starting to take a bite out of their corporate sales. (Funny, indie stores didn’t suffering in that way, huh? Strange.)
Anyway, it was transition time. As I collected unemployment and licked my wounds, I enrolled in college, got an English Degree (with a writing minor), and moved on to being a customer-only, with regards to bookstores.
Occasionally I come across my old nametags in a box, or a bargain art-book I picked up during employee appreciation days, and I’m completely lost in the late ’90’s, reading Bukowski on my breaks, listening to Man… Or Astro-Man?, trying to figure out what my first novel would be like.
There aren’t many days that I don’t think about my bookstore life. There was a point, just before The Rash was hired to fired all of us, where I knew that my life would be bookstores. Forever. My benefits had kicked up after passing the five year mark, the store was doing well, and I was carving out my own niche in the music department. I had imagined my entire future at that company, finding ways to tie the new music releases to books that were hot. At that point in time, I had spent more years, cumulatively, working in bookstores that doing anything else, and for more than dozen years, there was nothing more I loved than thinking about books.
I wanted to write books. I wanted to be around books. I wanted to talk about books. There was something about the kinds of wonderful and weird customers that came in that were my people, and I could tell immediately. While the corporate sheen of B&N usually attracted the kinds of young mall kids who were just looking to rip off music magazines or “Vampire: The Masquerade” RPG books, I imagined myself as part of an older tradition, one that was honored and respected. Someday, I would be an older man, still talking books, maybe handling the magazine department with a certain kind of zest that people would remember after I was gone.
Between that, and my paid radio days, I thought I had it sorted out.
And then, to loose it all in the name of corporate savings. It really changed a lot of how I view the world of large businesses, and their practices.
Watching “The Booksellers” highlights the kinds of customers and sellers and odd people that would come through the bookstores I was lucky enough to work in, and it was that taste of those personalities that brought all of this back to my mind. In a wonderful series of profiles, you get to know these various book dealers in this film, and their wonderful relationship to the world of Antiquarian Book Sales. These are quirky, unusual, but passionate people who love books more than almost anything, and the film is a wonderful cavalcade of these kinds of personalities, all beaming with the kinds of stories and notions that only bookhandlers have.
While I haven’t been in the book trade in over 15 years, I immediately recognized their analogs in the customers and professionals I met while I was talking Raymond Carver with some customer. There are certain things about “book people” that you can spot a mile away, and this movie has all of the wonderful quaintness of those folks, portrayed as larger than life personalities, they way some of them must certainly be seen by others in the industry.
But there isn’t really anything “epic” about this film. It is a quiet, thoughtful portrait of people who love books. Probably as much (and maybe a little more) than almost any of us love the things that we are also passionate about. And their passion is what this film delivers, in a delightful way that reminds us all, in these moments of isolation, the joy and delight that books offer as they isolate us from the scary world at large, and provide a window into something we can’t find anywhere else.
If you are a book person, then you already know these people. If not by reputation, then by how much they are like other people you already know. And if that’s not a strong enough recommendation, then I don’t know what is.
ACRONYM Inc. 