Confessions of a Book Shopper

by

Nicki Leone

“Look, a new bookstore.”

That statement has always been, for me, one of the happier phrases in the English language, so naturally I looked. We were driving along the road that runs on the eastern side of the river. Across the water you can see vast stretches of low and swampy land punctuated periodically by fairy castle-like factories that gleam in a tangle of metal pipes and smoke like lazy dragons. On this side of the river were the neighborhoods of all the people who worked in the factories on that side of the river. Streets lined with small clapboard houses in various states of disrepair ended at the old “river road” highway, which was itself lined with ancient filling stations, a couple of fast food franchises, and a series of mostly empty strip malls, one of which we were driving past, that had a pool hall, a nail salon, a karate school, and now, a bookstore. “DISCOUNT BOOKS” said the sign in slightly uneven large blue letters. We didn’t stop.

We didn’t stop because we were already late to be somewhere else. But there was something else that shook me a bit. I didn’t want to stop. For the first time since I was old enough to have my own library card, I saw a place with books and felt no desire to go in. No pull. No leap of excitement or interest. Nothing. I listened to this internal nothingness for a moment as we drove on, then turned to my partner and said, “You know, there was a time in my life when I couldn’t walk past a bookstore without going in, and when I couldn’t walk in without looking at every single book in the shop. What’s wrong with me?”

It is true that for most of my life whenever I was in a room with books, I made a point of looking at each and every one.  This didn’t just apply to libraries or bookstores, but to supermarket checkout lines, where I dawdled, next to my mother’s cart, reading the titles, authors and back cover summaries of the romances in the bottom rack below the soap opera digests and the weekly horoscopes. It was true of the department store discount bin, where I once as a teenager spent my entire lunch break and most of my first paycheck combing through the paperbacks and returning to my shift still hungry, but with a bag filled with a dozen Signet classics and one Bantam book called Tanglewood Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne, of all people. It was also of course true of people's houses, and you can be sure that whenever I was visiting anyone—even people I didn't know very well—I made a point of searching out and checking out the books in the house (sometimes even wandering into bedrooms and private studies in blatant disregard of their privacy).
 
Indeed, I was fixated on books and bookstores to such an extent that once, during an otherwise incredibly romantic week spent in Montreal during its annual Jazz Festival, I spent an entire day diverting our course from intended concerts to stop at every possible place that suggested books, including something that was obviously a warehouse for remaindered books in a cavernous room with high overhead fluorescent lights, cement floors, and long, dingy folding tables filled with cardboard boxes, filled with books. I walked slowly down each aisle, looking at every one. My girlfriend, extremely frustrated, muttered and grumbled behind me. “Stop reading,” she finally hissed, “and start living!” 

It says something about the kind of person I was that I thought she was being irritating and irrelevant.

I am what writer Murray Browne would call a “book shopper.” His definition of this term is somewhat fluid—in fact, he has written an entire book exploring the possible nuances and permutations of this self-invented term called . . . wait for it . . . The Book Shopper. At its most basic, the phrase seems to apply to those kinds of people who prefer to buy books rather than, say, use the library, but there is more to it than that. There are, after all, people who stop by the nearest Barnes & Noble on their way to or from work to pick up a book to read for the weekend in the same way they’ll stop and get a nice bottle of wine to have on hand for dinner. A simple, everyday sort of task. Part of living the good life.

A book shopper, on the other hand feels the pull, the draw, of a bookstore’s dim interior and closed, crowded shelves. A book shopper has a hard time walking by the open door of a bookstore, reluctantly slowing her pace to linger in front of the shop windows, peering in and wondering what may be discovered in the long dark aisles inside.

At least, I think that is what Murray Browne means by the term. In his book, he tends to talk all around it, without actually defining it. He exists, as he writes, at the “intersection” between the uber-shopper forever on the lookout for a good deal, the collector, forever on the lookout for the perfect edition, and the bibliophile, forever in search of the next thing to read. Browne calls his book a “guide to used bookstores” but it is really more of a contemplation on the draw of books and bookstores for him:  “a real (albeit quirky) passion for thinking about the many ways books affect our lives—how and where we shop for them, the people we know who read them, the small passages that stick in our heads for years only to reappear at the oddest moments.”

At its heart, then, The Book Shopper is a series of essays about all these things—essays not unlike the ones usually found in this column. So it will come as no surprise when I say that book people will find plenty of places for themselves in Browne's “intersection” between book shopper, book collector, book lover. It’s a vague, amorphous place that defies clear-cut boundaries, as do the essays in the book, which are divided loosely into three headings: “The Principles of Book Shopping,” “Acquisitions,” and “What Next? Read, Store, or Sell?” The most clearly defined section is the center one, which is basically an extended and heavily annotated list of some of the author’s favorite books and writers. His “prerequisites” for books every good bookstore should have (I was gratified to find Pat Barker first on the list, but then later disappointed not to find Richard Russo or Stewart O'Nan). His list of “the new journalists” meaning, largely, Hunter Thompson, Ray Mungo and Tom Wolfe (now there's a mad, Sartre-esque group). His “Big Social Book Shopping Novels” which is dominated by Jonathan Franzen.  

The rest of the essays, obviously, fall into the other two categories although it isn’t always clear why they are found in one and not the other. (Nor does it help that the essays are often footnoted with references to other pieces found earlier or later in the book—a practice I think that was adopted on the assumption that readers would be likely to dip and skim back and forth, rather than read straight through. I, however, read straight through.) Topics range from thoughts about his growing disenchantment with reviewing books professionally, to joining book groups, giving books as gifts, and managing a personal library when you are inclined to move, frequently. The pieces are touching and astute and often very funny, and are interspersed with inset pieces he calls “Bookmarks” that are funnier still: “All used books should avoid Greeneville, Tennessee,” he writes of the General Morgan Inn dining room, “. . . its ‘library’ decor turned out to be faux. Instead of shelves lined with books, the owners just tacked up thin boards, like ornamental baseboards, to look like shelves. Moreover, they had torn the cloth spines off books and glued them on the fake shelves to make a grand fake library . . . it was disturbing—like trying to eat in a room decorated with kitten skins.

Passages like that, or his very amusing, if sardonic, encounters with curmudgeonly, argumentative used bookstore owners and clerks, made me realize that the author and I would probably get along and could waste at least one evening and probably several more telling each other bookstore war stories that nobody but ourselves might find amusing.

It is something I notice frequently with books like The Book Shopper—that is, books about books. They are endlessly fascinating to those of us already in the biblio-church, so to speak. But they rarely manage to reach beyond preaching to the converted, and I think that is the case with Browne. His stories are clever, even delightful, and often quite poignant. But they are also somewhat insular. He is happy to talk to those of us who already haunt the bookstore aisles with him, burrowing through the stacks looking for treasure. But he is not standing at the door, calling to the passers-by, inviting them to come in.

I think I became a professional bookseller, instead of a book collector, because I have always wanted to invite people in. For whatever reason, the act of reading and the act of telling someone about what I am reading go hand in hand for me—I simply enjoy books more if I can talk about them.

I did not ever go back to “DISCOUNT BOOKS” by the way. I think it reminded me subconsciously of that book warehouse all those years ago in Montreal that marked the beginning of the end of a whirlwind romance. Then too, I have years of experience now with books and bookstores, and felt instinctively that whatever was behind those doors held more disappointment than promise—that what I would find would be closer to what Browne described as “a miserable excuse for a used bookstore—heavy into romances, piles of yellowed National Geographics, high-school textbooks (circa 1950), all thrown onto shelved or dumped in the aisles . . .”  (I admit, I still get tempted by National Geographic, because I love their pullout maps). 

I did, however, make a point later that week to go on a short pilgrimage of the bookstores in town I did like, and wander the aisles, and look at each and every title, and spend far more money than Murray Browne, book shopper and used book hunter, would probably approve of. Even though I spent some of it on the books he said I should read. And couple of times, even paid full price. 

Books mentioned in this column:
The Book Shopper by Murray Browne (Paul Dry Books, 2009)
Tanglewood Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne (Bantam, 1967)

Nicki Leone showed her proclivities early when as a young child she asked her parents if she could exchange the jewelry a well-meaning relative had given her for Christmas for a dictionary instead. She supported her college career with a part-time job in a bookstore, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that her college career and attending scholarships and financial aid loans supported her predilection for working as a bookseller. She has been in the book business for over twenty years. Currently she works for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, developing marketing and outreach programs for independent bookstores. Nicki has been a book reviewer for several magazines, her local public radio station and local television stations. She was one of the founders of The Cape Fear Crime Festival, currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network, and as Managing Editor of BiblioBuffet. Plus, she blogs at Will Read for Food. She manages all this by the grace of a very patient partner and the loving support of varying numbers of dogs and cats. Contact Nicki.