However, from the perspective of bookstore operators, bookstores are first of all a business, to take care of the taste of different readers, and secondly to maintain the operation of this business, can not fully rely on the profitability of books, on this basis to create the cultural characteristics of bookstores. Therefore, once a person who is picky and poisonous in reading becomes a clerk in a bookstore, the close gaze makes him disappointed in the bookstore. This man was George Orwell, the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Published in 1936 (originally titled "Memories of the Bookstore", subtitled by the editor), the following recounts George Orwell's experience as a part-time clerk in a used bookstore. Although it is now the 21st century, the bookstore, a place that bears the past and the future, does not seem to be much different from the past.
This article is included in "Fortunately, the Bookstore is Still There", and the editor also includes various "love-hate feuds" of other literary heroes and booksellers such as Hemingway and Balzac, although it is a hodgepodge of abstract nature, but there is no shortage of interesting short stories and small histories of booksellers.
Fortunately, the Bookstore Is Still There: The Bookstore Memories of the Literary Heroes, [United States] Hemingway et al., translated by Fu Lei, Li Jiangyan et al., edited by Xue Yuan, Xihaigu, Guangdong People's Publishing House, May 2021 edition
Headache for customers
If you hadn't worked in a used bookstore, you'd probably imagine a used bookstore as heaven, where there are always old gentlemen with a polite charm flipping through folios with calfskin covers. However, in terms of my own experience working in a used bookstore, this is by no means the case, and what impresses me is quite the opposite – there are very few real readers.
Our bookstore has an untold number of books, but there are probably no customers who know which of them is good and which one is bad. The most common customers in the store were the ladies who came to pick out birthday gifts for their nephews, who knew nothing about books and had no idea what books to buy; then there were the Oriental students who came to buy cheap textbooks, who kept haggling; and the elegant people who pretended to be experts only bought first-edition books; there were actually very few real lovers of literature.
Most of the patrons of second-hand bookstores are the kind of people who are annoying everywhere, but they have become gods in my place. For example, a lovely old lady told me that "I want to buy a book for a disabled person," and this ridiculous request is common. Another lovely old lady said that she had read a very good book in 1897 and asked if I could help her find it, but she did not remember the title, nor the author, of course, the contents of the book, she only remembered that the cover of the book was red.
Such customers are actually quite good, and there are two well-known kinds of nasty ghosts, and every second-hand bookstore has a headache for these people. A kind of person comes every day, sometimes several times a day, and smells of rotten bread crumbs, pestering you to buy his worthless broken books. Another type of person would go to a bookstore and order a lot of books, but they wouldn't want to pay at all. We never pay on credit, but customers can order, and we put aside the books he wants and wait for him to pick them up later. However, less than half of the customers who actually come back to pick up a book for pre-order.
At first I was very confused about this, why did they do this? They walked into the bookstore, asked for some rare and expensive books, repeatedly asked us to keep the book for them, and then walked out of the store and never came back. Later I understood that most of them were out-and-out delusional. They are clever and often make up all kinds of bizarre stories to explain that they are very unlucky to go out without money, and I am sure that many times they fully believe the lies and stories they have made up.
In a city like London, there are always many abnormal lunatics wandering the streets, and they are often attracted to bookstores, because bookstores are one of the few places that can be visited for a long time without spending money. Over time, people can almost immediately recognize these people. Even if they spit out lotus flowers, they will be recognized as lies over time.
When I encounter these delusional people, I usually put aside the books he wants, and as soon as he leaves, he immediately puts them back on the shelf. I've noticed that these people never try to take books away without paying, they just book and they're satisfied, and I guess that this may give them the illusion that they're really spending money.
Strange side hustle
Like most second-hand bookstores, our bookstores also have various side businesses, such as selling used typewriters. We also sell stamps, but they are used stamps. Philatelic enthusiasts are strange, they are as silent as fish, of all ages, but all men; women obviously cannot understand the special pleasure of pasting these flowery pieces of paper in a photo album.
We also sold a horoscope chart compiled by a man who claimed to have predicted the earthquake in Japan, and sold for 6p. The chart of horoscopes comes in a sealed envelope that I have never opened, but buyers often come to bookstores to tell us how clever the horoscope predicted by this chart of horoscopes is. (Any book that predicts horoscopes will tell you that you are attractive to the opposite sex, that your biggest flaw is being generous, and that you would no doubt think that such predictions are too clever.) ）
The business of children's books in our bookstore is very good, mainly cheap books sold at a discount. Today's children's books are simply terrifying, especially when they appear in piles before your eyes. Personally, I would rather recommend Pietronius the Arbiter to my children than sell them Peter Pan, and even Barry's work is more masculine and more beneficial to physical and mental health than those who later imitated him.
During the Christmas season, Christmas cards and calendars are bound to sell, and we will be busy selling these things for more than ten days, although these things are boring, but they can make a lot of money at the end of the year. I am curious whenever I see Christian religious sentiments being exploited by unreasonable, selfish people. The salespersons of the Christmas Card Company bring their catalog to the bookstore as early as June every year, and I always remember a sentence on one of their slips: "24 Christmas cards with the baby jesus and the bunny." ”
However, our main side business is book lending, that is, the kind of "two pennies to rent a book, no deposit" business, you can borrow about five or six hundred books, all of which are novels. Book thieves must love this kind of rented bookstore to death! Renting a book for two pennies from one bookstore, ripping off a label, and selling it to another bookstore for a shilling price is certainly the easiest money-cheating trick in the world. Still, bookstore owners think it's better to endure a certain amount of theft (our bookstore once lost 12 books a month) than to take a deposit and scare customers away.
Stills from the documentary Documentary 72 Hours: A Walk through the Movable Type Forest of Giant Bookstores (2013).
See people with real reading taste
Our bookstore is located right at the junction of the two suburbs of Hampstead and Camden, and the customers who patronize the store range from barons to bus conductors. Therefore, the book rental situation in our bookstore should be a fair representation of the overall reading level of Londoners.
Which writer's work is the most rented in our bookstore? Neither Priestley nor Hemingway, nor Walpole or Wardhouse, but Ethel Dale, followed by Warwick Deepin, and in third place should be Jeffrey Fano. The readers of Ethel Dale's novels are of course women, but not all old maids who hate marriage and fat ladies of tobacco shops, as people think, and in fact, Ethel Dale's fans are women of all ages.
It would be biased to say that men don't read novels, but there are some types of novels they really don't read. Roughly speaking, they do not read the so-called popular novels, that is, the typical British novels that are general, not good or bad, which seem to be written specifically for female readers. Men either read works of fiction that are truly worthy of respect or they read detective fiction, and they read an astonishing amount of detective fiction. I know of a customer at our bookstore who was so passionate about detective novels that he borrowed four or five detective novels from me every week for more than a year, and he must have rented books at another bookstore. What surprised me was that he never read the same novel a second time. Apparently, so much literary junk had taken hold of his brain (I reckoned that the pages of the detective novels he read every year would cover three-quarters of an acre if spread out). He wouldn't pay attention to the title or the author, but he only had to glance at it to see if he had already "read" the book.
In a loan bookstore, you can see people's real reading taste, not what they usually pretend. One thing you'll be shocked to know is that classical British novelists have fallen out of favor. If you put the works of Dickens, Thackeray, Jane Austen, Trollope, and others on the rental counter, I'm sure no one will pull them out, not even if they turn a few pages and put them back. Anyone who looks at these 19th-century writings will say, "Oh, this book is so old!" "After saying that, I immediately skipped this book and went to the next one."
However, selling books is not the same as borrowing books, and Dickens's books are always not worried about selling, just as Shakespeare's books are always very good. Dickens belongs to one of the kind of writers who "always want to read", and most of what people know about his books is hearsay, from other people, just like the Bible, everyone has heard a lot about the Bible, but probably not many people have read the Bible in its original form. People knew Bill Sykes as a complete villain and murderer, and they knew the fate of the orphan Pip, but it was all from other people, just as they had heard that Moses was lying in a basket when he was found, and that Moses had received oracles on the mountain.
Another very noteworthy thing is that American novels are becoming increasingly unpopular. In addition, in the past two or three years, some publishers have felt very anxious because short stories have become less and less popular. Many customers always ask us to recommend books, but like one of my German customers, they will say "I don't want to read short stories" or "I have no interest in short stories". If you ask them why, they sometimes explain that it's cumbersome to adapt to new characters in each story, and they like to immerse themselves in a novel that doesn't require further thought after reading the first chapter. In this case, I feel that the author has a greater responsibility than the reader, and most of the contemporary short stories, whether British or American, are dull and uninteresting, of no literary value, far less than most novellas and novellas. Only short stories like those written by David Herbert Lawrence can win the praise of readers, and his short stories are as popular as his long stories.
I lost my love of books
Do I want to be a bookstore owner myself? I had a decent time in the bookstore, but I basically didn't have the idea of being the owner myself.
If you can find a good place and prepare some funds, any educated person should be able to get a relatively stable income by running a bookstore, although it is not a big deal, and it will not be a problem to live. As long as you're not planning to run a rare book business, it's not a difficult business, and if you have some understanding of the meaning of books, you'll have a great advantage in doing it. (Most bookstore owners don't know anything about books.) Casually look at the advertisements for their purchase of old books, many of the must-have classic works may appear in their purchase catalogs, and their level can be imagined. And it's a relatively noble industry after all, and it can't become too vulgar. Even the largest bookstores cannot squeeze small independent bookstores like industry oligarchs squeezing grocers and milkmen.
But the long working hours in this industry, such as myself, I am just a part-time employee and need to work 70 hours a week for the boss (although I often run out to buy books during working hours), such working hours is definitely an unhealthy lifestyle. Bookstores are bound to be horribly cold in winter, because if the indoor temperature is higher, the windows will be shrouded in fog and become invisible, and the foundation of the bookstore business is the clear window display. Books produce more dust than any human invention today, smell worse, and the green-headed fly likes to make the book its final destination before dying.
But none of this was the real reason why I was reluctant to pursue a lifetime in the bookstore business, the real reason was that my experience in the bookstore made me lose my love of books. A bookstore owner has to say something against his heart in order to do business, and over time, it will inevitably wear down his love for books, and worse, he will have to keep moving books around to clean the dust.
There was a time when I really loved books — I liked to read them in my hand and smell them faintly, of course, I was talking about old books from at least 50 years ago or earlier. For me, there's nothing happier than spending a shilling at a country auction to buy back a whole bunch of these old books. Picking out a whole bunch of books that you really like is a great treat, even though they're somewhat broken. The poetry collections of the little poets of the 18th century, the expired magazines, the forgotten novels, and the bound editions of women's magazines of the 1860s all exude a fascinating aroma. For casual reading, such as when you're lying in the bathtub taking a shower, or late at night when you're too tired to fall asleep, or for the ten minutes you've had nothing to do before lunch, there's nothing more appropriate than flipping through the expired Girls' Garden.
But since I went to work at a bookstore, I haven't bought any more books. Being faced with countless books every day, five thousand or ten thousand, is tiresome, even disgusting. Now I only buy a book once in a while, and it's a book I want to read but can't borrow, and of course I never buy that literary junk. The enchanting aroma of the worn-out pages of the vicissitudes can no longer appeal to me, for in my mind the scent of books that once haunted me is now mixed with the disgusting paranoias and the corpses of green-headed flies.
Author | George Orwell
Excerpts | Shen Chan
Edit | Shen Chan
Introduction Proofreading | Wang Xin