"nostalgia is the whore of memory"

~John Fante

I am not sure that working in a bookstore carries quite the same cache that it used to. When i was in high school and then later, in college, all of my friends wanted to work in bookstores (actually a bookstore or a record store~as music stores were still called back then even though vinyl was already on its way out), like that would be The Coolest job. My first bookstore job was as a Christmas temp at a mall Waldenbooks (and i had actually had a job working at a music store~in that same mall a couple of years earlier~a chain that now also sells books~go figure) where i worked for a month and then quit to work another temp job at a ski resort with my boyfriend (i also had two other jobs at the time so my schedule was a bit full). About a year later i started at a tiny B. Dalton in the same mall (again it was a third job), i stayed there for about a year before i moved out of state to start library school and i loved it (actually it reminds me very much of the library i work in now~the staff feeling at least), minimum wage and all (by that time i had ditched my food service job and was squeaking by as a bookstore clerk, library shelver, and library volunteer~pay was lousy but i figured it was good experience, and it did put me ahead of many of my future classmates~surprisingly few had any public service experience~but at the time the last thing i wanted to be was a Public librarian~ugh).

Anyway, i do like to read books by fellow bibliophiles and bookpeople to try and recreate/evoke (re-evoke?) that whole feeling. I was rather excited to hear about Wendy Werris' An Alphabetical Life: Living It Up in the World of Books hoping for just such a tale, and i was actually a little disappointed. The book actually had great reviews so i can't really say why it didn't grab me, perhaps i didn't really care for Werris' personality (or what i could sense of it through the covers of a book)~perhaps she was a little like me~i've often wondered if i am very likable~tho it doesn't concern me much. Perhaps it was the sales rep in her. Perhaps it was that there were very few parts that felt like a personal story to me (or even a story of a fellow bibliophile). I do know that she seemed to be limited to her own world though she was speaking for the publishing world at large because i caught her in a few mistakes and inconsistencies which i knew to be wrong just from my own little book world (and that just irks me). Overall i'm glad i read the book, glad i didn't purchase it (don't you just love libraries?), but that's just my opinion~most of the reviews were much more positive...

Time was Soft There is a much more entertaining read although, in it, Jeremy Mercer tells of a bookstore unlike any other, George Whitman's Shakespeare & Co. in Paris, France. I found Time was Soft There to be a much more appealing and relatable book than An Alphabetical Life. Although, as i mentioned, Shakespeare & Company is an entirely unique store (one that serves as new and used book store, a lending library, and a kind of free hostel for struggling writers) i found many of the characters somewhat familiar and, in some ways the bookstore itself almost recognizable as the bookstore i called home/work when i was in grad school. Mercer was definitely a much more likable voice for me as well.

Shakespeare and Company, in its current incarnation, opened in 1951, first named Le Mistral it then changed its name when Sylvia Beach, the owner of the legendary first Shakespeare and Company (publisher of Joyces Ulysses and rhapsodised about in Hemmingway's A Movable Feast), died. George Whitman, a communist, likes to think of his store as a "socialist utopia" and will let writers stay there for the price of their biography, their help with opening the store in the morning (dragging all the boxes out to the street and setting up the shelves); an hours worth of work in the store per day; closing the store at night; and reading one book per day. Sounds almost cool~though the living conditions aren't the greatest~but it is Paris. Wonderful, wonderful book.