I got the best job I've ever had because I had a pack of cigarettes on the front seat of my car.
When I moved to Nantucket in the fall of 1998, I knew no one and had a part-time job working in the office of the Episcopal church. I worked with a wonderful woman named Joan who shared a house with a former teacher. They ran a heavy-duty book group that met once every couple of weeks, spending several weeks on a single book. This was long before I started making jewelry, and I was shy and had a hard time meeting people. I spent that first winter going to work, hiding in my room reading, and cursing the buffeting wind that howled off the harbor round the clock. A book group seemed like a really good idea - particularly in a cozy house in town, on a sheltered street, a mile inland. When I joined, they were just starting Robert Pinsky's translation of Inferno. I hadn't read Inferno since my first year of college, and really loved the new edition. Several weeks into the group, they invited the owner of the local bookstore to come to the group and read to us. Mimi was fluent in Italian, and she read several passages from the original in that beautiful language, sounding rich and liquid and as if flames were licking around the words.
After the group, I offered her a ride back to the store on Main Street. She plucked a pack of cigarettes off my passenger seat, sat down, and fished one of her own out of her massive linen pockets. She said, "Well, you read and you smoke. Would you like to come and work for me?"
Oh yes, I would. Very much. Mitchell's Book Corner was a legend in Nantucket. For its size, it's the best-curated bookstore I've ever seen, touching on every subject with an eye to both classics and new books. Mimi had a sterling reputation for selling exactly the right book to the right reader, whether she'd known them all her life or they'd just walked into the store five minutes earlier. A local business heavyweight nicknamed her the Maven of Main Street. She'd read everything, averaging more than a book a day for most of her life. She had excellent business sense, a steel trap memory, a fierce temper and her own way of doing things. Mitchell's didn't use a computerized inventory system (in fact, they didn't own a computer when I started there, and did all their buying by phone from publishers and with the aid of monthly microfiche updates from distributors). Mimi knew the stock of the store inside out from memory, and she expected her booksellers to do the same.
I'd worked in several bookstores before, but this was a whole new level of fun and challenge. Knowing the full inventory of a bookstore by memory means you absorb the life of books into your body. Stocking and straightening shelves, climbing through the dusty basement shelves doing inventory, I pulled the knowledge of books into myself through my fingertips. There is nothing more satisfying than taking a list of books from a customer and, without looking anything up, pulling Don't Stop the Carnival, Nightbirds on Nantucket, Snow Crash, Motherless Brooklyn, How to Cook Everything, Vile Bodies, A Coney Island of the Mind, The Tipping Point and A People's History of the United States off the shelves. (That's an actual list someone gave me once.) I adored it, and I was good at it. For three and a half years, I lived in that bookstore like it was a second skin. One of the most contented moments of my life was leaning in the door on a late evening before locking up, watching the rain, smelling that paper-in-humidity smell and being aware that I was in my exact right place.
Nantucket, as it turned out, was not my exact right place and I went back to Chicago in the autumn of 2002. Mimi had retired half a year earlier, and although I still loved Mitchell's, it didn't feel the same without her. I've had good jobs and bad jobs and jobs that were just a job, but there was never another one like that. I was talking to my brother last weekend about my current job hunt, and said that I'd like to go back to bookselling. He said, "Really? You still want to do that?"
Oh yes, I would. Very much.
2 comments:
That sounds like heaven. As you know, the only bookstore I ever worked in was Borders, which is a far cry from the magic you described, but under that corporate red shininess, I could get lost in shelving and pulling books for hours and hours. I also like that the clientele of bookstores is so diverse, and people are so passionate about what they're reading, there were so many "connections" made while helping customers. I remember one in particular where a customer was talking about "Perfume" by Patrick Suskind. They told me they were so upset by the ending of the book that they literally threw it across the room. Guess what I bought and read that night! I wish you luck in finding a job like that again!
You've reminded me of a story I'd forgotten. A customer came in once with a book and said that she was so upset by it that she didn't want it in her house, so she was bringing it back. She'd chosen it herself, it wasn't a recommendation, and she didn't want her money back. She just wanted to get rid of it. And that's how I read Running With Scissors by Augusten Burroughs.
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