Listen to Jim: http://www.jimreedbooks.com/mp3/thataway.mp3 or read on…
Making a living in the previously-loved-book trade is not what you think.
For instance, many times over, job applicants, young and old, say,
1. ”Gee, I’d love to work here. You get to sit in an old book store and read all day and talk with Book People.”
or
2. “Are you hiring?” as if one could just walk right in and take over my world and know what’s what and how to do it, no qualifications required.
or
3. “I’d like to open a book store when I retire,” as if operating a shop is something you can immediately succeed at and still take your afternoon nap and your extended vacation, while keeping up with rent and overhead.
or
A thousandfold other comments and asides that indicate shoprunning looks like the easiest thing in the world.
You might find taking a book excursion with me to be rather eye opening, somewhat scary at times; you might find it to be doggone hard work, too.
This afternoon, I head 30 miles to the county line to follow up on a phone call. Woman says she has 60 boxes of good books ready to sell reasonably if I’ll just come and go through them.
The journey is half the fun, since I get to see parts of the region not normally imagined by us city dwellers:
The skeletal structure of a ferris wheel rims the horizon, a bowling alley named SUPER BOWL whizzes past—good name for a bowling alley, the haunted ghost-filled windows of a dozen abandoned general stores sucked dry of life by chain inconvenience facilities, double-wide homes leaning in the breeze, clothes lines filled with mentionables better left unmentioned, a Sunday-closed bar-b-q place bracing itself for Monday breakfast gorgers…and so on. It’s a grand tour of who we were, who we don’t want to be, who we might have been but for the grace of. And it’s as humbling as lying in a field on a clear night and allowing the stars to put us in our minuscule celestial dunce corners.
I arrive at the HOT DOG HOT ROD RESTAURANT (“Bikers Welcome”), or what may be what’s left of it, where several family members sit out front and regard the citified bookdealer who dares beam himself into their midst. The woman who called tells me to follow her car down a dirt road to where the books are stored, and I embark into the unknown just knowing I’m going to have an adventure. The rolling hills seem to be shards of strip mining land, what with the patchy greenery and the green-tinted pond spread about. A large open-air barn houses pieces of our culture—thousands of record albums from Al Jolson to Charlie Pride, thousands of books, surprisingly clean, dry and well-kept in boxes. I try to ignore the temptation of looking at other artifacts worth obtaining and just concentrate on the books, and the effort does pay off. I select a hundred titles ranging from Plato to Grizzard, stuff that will replenish my stock of good, reasonably-priced reading material.
The woman is happy with the money, her grown kids are happy that somebody wants these books, the titles of which they can barely read. One large son packs my car for me, and they all hop into vehicles to lead me back to the highway on the narrow path.
The woman repeatedly reports that she’s glad somebody wants the books, since her husband has commanded her to get rid of them or he’ll take them to a landfill. She somehow knows, as I do , that throwing a book away is a sin—even if her definition of sin isn’t always the same as mine.
I feel good about the Sunday afternoon jaunt and can’t wait to make several other trips tomorrow in my quest to locate the Holy Grail piece by piece and day by day, in this sacred profession called bookdealing/bookloving/bookcollecting/bookreading/bookwriting
(c) 2011 A.D. by Jim Reed