In Praise of Booksellers
on the new bere moon
In this missive:
Musings on book selling and booksellers
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It’s the New Bere Moon—bere is the neolithic grain still grown and used in Orkney. I don’t eat much gluten, but I make an exception for this low-gluten, local grain with a slight mineral tang. A bakery in nearby Evie makes a sourdough beremeal loaf that is to die for. If all goes according to plan, I’ll go by their little shop with its honesty box & baskets of fresh baked loaves as a way to celelbrate the Mabon New Moon today.
Just after Mabon, I’m heading down to Edinburgh and the Scottish Borders for more book signings and talks.
This month has been a whirlwind, but as I stand at the centre of the storm, I’m filled with gratitude for the opening up of what has been a gruelling journey, and for the force of nature that is booksellers. Booksellers have ushered Ashes and Stones into the world with such care, introducing it to a wide readership.
Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedIt was a bookseller who told me I’d sold out my first print run.
It was a bookseller that hung out and helped me sign a giant pile of books during the socially-awkward-ego-bumper-cars moment of my first book fest.
It was booksellers who, over and over, confided in me when no one else in publishing would, saying your book is doing so well for us.
It was a bookseller who put the leaf garland around the poster for Ashes and Stones in the window display of Glasgow’s Sauchiehall Waterstones.
It was a bookseller who arranged the flowers in the vase on the front table behind the pile of Ashes and Stones.
It was a bookseller who displayed a copy of Ashes and Stones near the entrance of a shop in Trafalgar Square.
It was booksellers who, all unseen, created the face-outs on shelves all across the country.
Booksellers read it & talked it up.
You know how I know? Because I was once a bookseller. For many years, I worked at a big chain store in the 90s. Borders put all the cool little bookshops in Long Beach out of business, and every book person was driven to either work or shop there. The managers were petty overlords, but the other booksellers were a stellar group of kind, fascinating fellow readers. It was the last time I felt like I was part of a ‘team’ in any real sense, and it was the most diverse workplace I’ve ever had—people came from all walks of life, all backgrounds. A passion for reading united us. As in any retail job, we formed a cynical in-group as a way to detox from dealing with the public—who, it must be said—can be straight-up abusive to retail workers.
We would compete to see who could make the late-night announcements on the PA sexy (I always won), who could wrap up a book up with the most flare (Melissa), and who put the most esoteric tunes on rotation (Jeff). We had each other’s backs—we covered shifts when things got rough, even staying late together to remove all the porn some gross person was secreting away in children’s books. We hung out at lesbian bars, cried over break ups, helped each other move, and read John Ashbury together.
I remember one of the managers, the hands-off one that hired me like I’d won some high stakes game, put a news article up in the break room about something called “Amazon.” I thought it was about the South American biome. At that time, the internet was a place of geeky list-serves and clunky HTML sites. I pictured Amazon catering to UFO aficionados or war history buffs collecting obscure tomes, or perhaps a penny-a-book scheme like the CD subscriptions of the day. The whole point of shopping for a book was a social thing, a tactile experience, a venturing out to make the acquaintance of a new bundle of words—words you didn’t even know you needed in that moment. There might be coffee. Who would choose to do it on the internet? The manager could see we didn’t get how dire this was, the lot of us—wasters sitting around eating our sad sack lunches. She announced with sober gravity—this will kill us.
In the end, it wasn’t Amazon but corporate greed that destroyed that particular chain—the big shareholders and upper management staged a buy-up-and-sell-off coup that devastated the company and so many lives with it.
Amazon hasn’t killed bookshops. Booksellers in brick-and-mortar shops still have the power to make someone’s career. This month, the largest British book chain, Waterstones, chose Ashes and Stones as their Scottish Book of the Month, allowing it to reach a whole new audience. I don’t know how books get chosen—but I’m sure booksellers had something to do with it.
This kind of thing only happens once in a life—a time of firsts and celebrations. Deep down I’m still that young woman standing all day in knee supports, working on Xmas, taking home the uneaten sandwiches from the cafe, and sighing into PA with breathless abandon, please take your final selections to the till.
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