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Why, reader?
Why, when I wandered into New Eden Books today to visit with my old co-workers, could I not just walk out again empty-handed? (It’s not like I have forty pages of at least vaguely academic prose to produce within the next three weeks. Not like I have anything to read. No sir.)
Why, when I realized I couldn’t resist the temptation of books (to be paid for in dollars! o, exquisite currency!), why did I have to buy this one?
Why couldn’t it have been the new Ken Follett, or a police procedural, or even a fucking Phillippa Gregory romance, for chrissakes?
Why, why, why is the volume sitting next to my computer very much titled Against the Day?
Why?!?!?
We turned out the lights and the books all seemed to sigh. My fingers, grimy from dusting and from counting out cash, found in the semi-darkness the dial of the air conditioner; with a more audible, more mechanical sigh, it extinguished itself. I opened the door and the bright, crispening air of a slow Sunday evening crept over us and over the books in the window. I glanced back at the glow from the bright office nightlight and dwelled on the border between the silence inside and the noise of the street. I thought a good-night to the books as I turned on my heel, let the door swoosh to a leisurely close, and turned my key in the lock.
Goodbye, then, to my fierce little bookshop.
I will miss it, and I will also be glad when I think of it there, beyond sight, tucked into its corner, tended by kind and generous spirits.
I used to think that the ultimate, perhaps only, proper trope of the bookish life was a gleaming, wood-panelled, gold-lampshaded Victorian reading room, in which a slight young woman sits at a heavy antique table (on which she has irreverently kicked up her cowboy-booted feet) poring one by one through heavy, dust-smelling leather-bound volumes.
Reader, I stand corrected.
I grant that there is less palpable romance stitched into the bookish world of my duties at New Eden Books, that many of the volumes on our shelves range from the uninspiring to the flat-out revolting, and that the bottom-line commercialness of the whole enterprise can be on occasion despair-inducing. However.
You may have noticed that I am fascinated by the materiality of books. I mean this in the simplest, most spare of senses — there is something enormously satisfying about their clunky object-ness, about their corners digging into my arms, my belly, my breasts, as I haul them around, about the way they shed little paper-motes all over my jeans, the clean chemical smell of a fresh, unopened volume, the soft, dry sound they make as they settle in against each other when I array them on a shelf. Most of my days at NEB are shaped by the moving of books – shelving, arranging, displaying, re-arranging, tidying, fetching, replacing, adjusting, hunting down and catching-as-they-fall of books. This constant movement, and the attendant sense of the overwhelming materiality of these allegedly highly immaterial objects, is perhaps my favorite aspect of my work.
In some ways, selling books, making the commercial enterprise function as it should, entirely relies on developing a sense of a book’s object-ness, on learning to relate to books as material beings and learning how to coax out of this basic materiality a saleable product that is more than the sum of its parts.
To depart for a moment from the abstract: the other day I put myself in charge of fixing a problem section. We had moved Classics out of its weird hidey-hole behind the register into a new home befitting the stature of Silas Marner, Leo Bloom, and the Wife of Bath. The satisfaction of this move, from a commercial standpoint, derived mostly from the splendid loveliness of black spines and elegantly designed covers arranged as they should be, with room enough to show themselves off, get themselves adopted into new homes, and to grow. But what left me feeling immensely delighted was the quick efficiency with which Boss Lady and I had muscled new shelves into place, rapidly reshelved the hundred or so volumes that constitute the section, our fingers moving quickly to face out Tess or Joseph Conrad, our shoulders tensing as we reached to straighten Austen or bent to shuffle Wharton and Wordsworth. Books and bodies, discrete material beings, find a kind of interchange in these moments that I find intensely pleasurable.
So there Classics was, all arrayed, and now we had this gap on the side of the unit whose front side housed an amalgam of Reference and meta-books (reading and writing, books about books, miscellanies, a small smattering of theory, and so on). Cheerily tired, we left it for later. The next morning, I decided to make this small problem my own and fix it. I pulled out of Reference all the meta-books that didn’t belong there, arranged them newly by category, and replaced them on the ex-Classics shelves. I pulled Essays out from where they languished with Short Stories in the back, and nestled them in under Meta-Books. A lovely complete Didion found a home displayed atop the unit alongside an illustrated Walden and Maira Kalman’s delightful reinvention of Strunk and White. Chomsky on language got a faceout, as did Anne Lamott’s beautiful treatise of advice to writers. Back in the reference section, The New York Times Guide to Essential Knowledge spooned with Bartlett and propped up 1001 Books To Read Before You Die. Roget got arranged according to size, and a shelf was moved to accommodate world atlases that had previously slumbered on their backs.
This small project finished, I sat on the floor to admire it, and felt deeply connected to the humming life of our little store. We’ve since started selling a lot more reference books, and people stop more frequently to peruse the style guides. The simple gestures of connection between a bookseller and her books, the physical interaction between body and object, made meaningful by what those objects signify and the ideas it is their job to present, begin to translate into successful commerce. This rhythm reproduces itself on an hourly basis at New Eden Books, and I have come to find it deeply satisfying.
Swooshy black pants: check.
Dancing shoes: check.
Hot black shirt, dramatic white scarf, and outsize silver hoops: check.
Bangles, mascara, lipstick: check.
Disco nap: check.
Dorothy Parker shot glass: check.
Seven-fifty of Absolut: check.
Reader, it’s not what you think. New Eden Books, along with every other book retailer on the effing planet, is releasing the seventh Harry Potter book at midnight. A momentously joyous occasion for millions of readers; hell on earth for booksellers everywhere. And I will be goddamned if I’m going to be miserable and sober and uncute.
Oh, right: Witch’s hat. Check.
This past Saturday at the bookstore, I reached or perhaps passed my New Eden threshold. I was also doing inventory crap in the children’s section, which exists in some kind of eighty-dimensional timespace vortex and whither only the most stalwart of booksellers dare venture. This may have exacerbated the twitching, bare-nerve state I enter every time I pass that threshold.
Two of my coworkers, Birmingham and Lefty Sophisticate, stood chatting (talking aesthetics of invitations, I believe) behind me when the moment came to clutch the register’s monitor with both hands and lay my forehead against the screen while emitting an expansive groan of surrender. “Oh honey,” Birmingham said “why don’t you give all this a rest and go get yourself an ice cream cone?”
I didn’t get an ice cream cone, but I did have a walk and a cigarette, and when I got back I determinedly figured out how to open the drawer of the CD player (right hook to the control panel) and extracted another noxious contributor to my proto-postal disposition: the Putumayo World Music mix, “Weekend in Ibiza.” I replaced it with Joni Mitchell, and my day got worlds better.
I sat in the vortex of death children’s section singing “A Case of You,” happy that my sad, dusty alto voice was at its best at that moment, and articulating for me the process of depressurizing. When your basic giant dickwad walked in soon after, I was calm enough to defuse his situation and merely suggest to Birmingham that we keep a loaded automatic under the register.
Still, by the time I made it into the train to New York this morning, I felt like I was wearing my skin inside out. The only way I can describe this feeling is as a kind of aphasia. I said to Lyrical the other day that I feel isolated in New Eden because virtually no one here speaks my language, both literally and figuratively. I thought of it in terms of foreignness, of an irreducible difference between myself and my surroundings, of the impossibility of translation. But I’m now realizing that mine is an aphasiac anxiety — I attempt to express something, tell some story about myself, and whatever comes out is something entirely unintended that has a sense wholly unrelated to what I had wished to communicate. Or nothing comes out at all.
I don’t mean this, really, in terms of actual spoken language — though there’s that, too. I can’t say what I mean, exactly, but it’s something to do with feeling that the edges of my self are eroding, or that the world has turned upside down and forgotten to take me with it.
What saves me, aside from frequent trips to Dishtown and New York, where kindred spirits resuscitate me, is that the ladies of New Eden Books are not what I expected them to be. To look at Boss Lady or Birmingham, I’d never have thought they were people I could get along with peaceably, let alone befriend. Getting to know these women, recognizing their complexity and allowing them to recognize mine, finding what lies behind what I thought I saw when I first met them, has been an incredible opportunity.
Some kind of leftover adolescent angst born of my high school self’s sense that everyone was evil and everyone was out to get her, some judgmental defense mechanism caused me to write off, for example, the Literary Hoover from the moment I met her. She was, to be fair, wearing something suspiciously pink and well-pressed, but according to my code of judgement I had no reason to believe that I had encountered in her the most voracious reader I’ve ever met. I had no idea I’d be finding myself relieved to have her standing next to me as the only person in a fifty mile radius who could get excited with me over histories of premodern medicine. Another coworker proved to have a delightful, easy laugh and an ability to talk about virtually anything with interest, and in still another I discovered an inexhaustible reservoir of silliness and affectionate sweetness.
Some of them even get me. Boss Lady has learned how and when it’s funny to tease me about my radicalism and sometimes-sardonic aspect, and Lefty Sophisticate laughs with me in my snarky moments and knows to squeeze my shoulder when someone buys a James Dobson book. At the end of a long day recently, Birmingham said, “I’m real glad you’re going to Brit City on the Sea — I think that’s gonna be real good for you.” This came as an incredible relief — she understands, I thought, that I don’t belong here, that it’s not inventorial misadventures making me twitch but a profound sense of isolation and a streak of wanderlust. She sees that I don’t fit in, and she likes that about me.
Just goes to show, mouse, I thought to myself: don’t you burn any bridges, because you never know when the straight blonde Republican ex-flight-attendant pink-pants-wearing tennis-playing fiftysomething Southerner is going to turn out to be your favorite new friend.
I hate coming out. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it.
It’s not my closet. I’m not hiding anything. A given interlocutor has a closet in her head out of which I am obligated to wrest myself. It is the assumptions of others that dominate those conversations. It makes me fucking insane. This is likely because I was lucky enough to spend five years in a place where, generally, heterosexuality was not assumed, or not as vigorously as it is here in New Eden.
Now, I don’t read as queer, even to other queers, because I’m not butch. (Dispensing, for the nonce, with the rant about the supposed equation between dykeness and butchness.) I’m not femme, either (another rant about binaries hereby dispensed with), but I’m a fey little thing and will always be read as feminine, no matter how I present. Body language can do a lot — folks with good queerdar will pick me up pretty quickly after a few minutes of conversation. But, sadly, New Edeners tend not to come with the right software for such nuanced observation. (In high school and early college, I wore a rainbow belt — and even that wasn’t enough.)
Since presentation won’t do it for me, language has to carry the burden of proof. Unfortunately, I don’t have energy to explain my identifications fully, but I also hate identifying with a simple label for the benefit of the clarity of mind of others. And there’s always the which-label problem: when pressed, I identify as queer or as a dyke. I despise “gay,” and “lesbian” makes my skin crawl. “Sapphist” is a fabulous throwback, but illegible in most circles. Further misfortunes occur surrounding the fact that, in a place like New Eden, “queer” and “dyke” must carry with them an ungainly Queer 101 lecture that is likely to sound threatening to these sweet little straights.
Not that I mind threatening, but some of these sweet little straights are my coworkers and I must continue to get along with them, for my own peace of mind. I’m not fully out at work yet, and it drives me nuts. Worse, of course, than any of the dynamics of coming out is the horror of being read as straight. But I refuse to engage in the kind of PSA-style revelation of my so-called “sexuality” that dominates narratives of disclosure in this culture. So how do I maintain my integrity in a way that also allows me to continue to have healthy working relationships with my coworkers, about half of whom are probably homophobes?
Sex lives, or even romantic lives, are not a topic of conversation at New Eden Books. And I’m not currently partnered, so the “my girlfriend” drop is out. So I envision a scenario like this one:
“Hey mouse, have you read the new Joyce Carol Oates?”
“No, not yet. But I was reading that Sarah Wa–”
“Oh, but the Oates is so great! There’s a galley in the back – grab it before someone else does. Hey, will you shelve these for me?”
“Sure. Also, I have sex with women!”
Clearly not the way to go about things, but what’s a little dyke to do when nobody knows she’s a dyke?
I work in a small independent bookstore in a small suburban town. The store has its limitations, but we justify its failings (an over-emphasis on tchatchkes, for example) with mushy-liberal soundbytes about how it’s “important” to have a bookstore in New Eden, and “supporting” independent bookstores is also “important.”
It’s not that I don’t believe those things. I do, firmly and totally. But, of course, there’s more to the bookstore problem than the comfort of wistful, wealthy New Edeners.
Because we’re such a small store, and because most of our clientele is so wealthy that they don’t bother to pay attention when I tell them their totals before swiping their Amex cards, we sell everything at full retail price. This means that even with my substantial discount, I can still generally get what I want — new — more cheaply on Amazon or at a megastore. Used, in like-new condition, I can get virtually anything I want for next to nothing on Amazon or eBay. These services are also substantially more convenient — we don’t have a huge inventory at New Eden Books, and special orders generally take five or six business days to arrive.
Now, while I realize that these differences are likely due in large part to the systemic favor conferred on big corporations by the publishing industry, I have trouble not believing that Amazon and the megastores are a democratizing force in the world of books. The two statements are not mutually contradictory.
The French have solved some of the problem with their “prix unique du livre” — by law, a new copy of a given edition of a given book must cost the same amount absolutely everywhere. (The same applies to cigarettes and gasoline.) This means that the only advantage the big chains have over independents is the size of each store’s inventory. The phenomenon, encouraged by the prix unique law, of flourishing specialized bookstores balances out this advantage. “Yes,” I think to myself, “I can get lots of books at Gibert Joseph, but I can get better books, and talk to knowledgeable salespeople, at Ombres Blanches.” The law has also encouraged a boom in the production of “livres de poche,” cheap (three-to-six-Euro) paperback editions, frequently of books that are also published in nice, expensive editions. And because the great publishing houses stand to gain a lot from the livres de poche market, these cheap editions are frequently very well executed. Gallimard’s Folio imprint, while not as bibliogasmically gorgeous as their fancy editions, produces excellent, frequently excellently annotated, editions of middle- and high-brow books. For this I am deeply endebted to them. In short, for a long while the law enchanted me as an example of a spot where, for once, socialisme à la française was working.
Then it occurred to me that the imposed market-control probably means that the price of books is set somewhat higher than it is in American megastores. So perhaps, while maintaining the illusion of socialistic idealism, the prix unique du livre in fact reinforces the status of books as an élite commodity.
Don’t worry, all this isn’t leading to some grand statement. I don’t know what the solution to these problems is, but I think about them more or less constantly at work. As I watch how hard the store’s managers have to fight to keep our little place alive, as I watch customers become frustrated with having to wait for a special order and huff off with a “Whatever, I’ll just go to Borders,” I realize what a miraculous thing a small-town bookstore is. I already know many of the customers by name. I have whole conversations with two-thirds of the people who come in, even if they don’t buy anything. In a town that’s, um, hardly known for its intellectualism, we at New Eden Books maintain a healthy bibliophilic haven.
But the reality is that on my salary, even with my discount, I can’t afford to buy as many books as I read at New Eden Books. I realize that I should discipline my book-buying habits, borrow most of what I read from the rather good town library, and only buy what really matters to me. Then I would be better equipped to support local bookstores. But I like books. I like their materiality. I need to own them. I am a book fetishist. I am therefore a full-scale devotee of Amazon, Borders, and Barnes & Noble (in that order). There will be more on this, I’m sure. For now, the point is: goddammit, I want it both ways!
