Shift Notes: Bookselling

A bookseller in Las Vegas and Service by John Tottenham.

A bookseller in Las Vegas offers the following:

All labor is physical labor, even if it involves sitting at a desk for several hours a day. A common refrain me and my coworkers often hear from customers is how nice and relaxing it must be to work in a bookstore. It can be those things, but bookselling requires the same kind of manual labor you'd find at pretty much any retail job. I've thrown out my back numerous times lifting heavy boxes of books, to say nothing of various cuts, aches, and sore areas, particularly the neck and shoulders, that come from both physical work and stress.

There's a lot of squatting and crawling involved to organize low shelves and tidy up displays. You clean up piss, shit, and sometimes drugs in the bathrooms. Somewhat predictably, there's so much dust that you breathe in when cleaning areas of the store that are less easily accessible and therefore able to accumulate dirt and grime. And perhaps this goes without saying, but in over a decade of bookselling and watching customers struggle with finding titles or authors it is absolutely not a given, you have to be good at spelling. Which means you have to watch people be bad at it. Which means you have to build up a lot of patience. Most people are fine with locating a book based on the first letter of an author's last name. Things get dicey when they have to move to the second and third letters.

I was going to write back to this person that their tone brings to mind Service by John Tottenham, but I might as well write it here instead (sorry to hijack this submission, feel free to stop reading).

Service, which came out last year, is a short novel narrated by a bookseller working in a gentrified Los Angeles neighborhood. He hates the customers, he hates his coworkers, he hates the neighborhood, and—most of all—he hates himself. The book is funny, but in the way that makes you flinch, because the outlook is too close to home. It was, for me at least, genuinely painful to read in places.

There’s a particular kind of bitterness that comes from realizing you think you’re wasting your own potential while also being unable or unwilling to do much about it. The narrator has that bitterness in spades. He knows he’s being nasty. He knows he’s a fraud. And instead of metabolizing that inward, he sprays it outward at everyone who walks through the door asking for help. It’s a book fueled almost entirely by displaced self-disgust. (I have gotten puzzled looks over the years for calling Cherry, a similarly dark and self-hating book, one of the funniest contemporary novels, so maybe its humor won’t be to everyone’s liking.)

Tottenham is very explicit about the psychic dimension of bookselling. “It is the fate of the terminal bookstore employee to frequently be addressed by people he doesn’t know,” the narrator notes early on, as strangers greet him with inexplicable familiarity. He describes customers as people who “wanted to kill my time too,” and himself as “a captive audience,” with “no control over my interactions.” Behind the counter, he writes, he becomes “a dumping ground for the unloading of loneliness and desperation.”

The Vegas bookseller’s emphasis on the physical toll of the job finds its counterpart here in the narrator’s description of depletion. After long shifts, he says, “I have never in my life been so wrung out as I am at the end of these shifts,” even though bookselling is not “exactly backbreaking labor.” It’s the combination that does it: standing, lifting, crawling on the floor — and then absorbing other people’s moods.

Tottenham is also unsparing about what this kind of work does to a person over time. “If I wasn’t already a misanthrope, this job would have turned me into one,” the narrator admits. Later, more bluntly: “I used to wonder what made booksellers so grumpy. Now I know.”

There’s a lingering fantasy of bookstore work as somehow not real work. People still talk about it like it’s a paid hobby. Meanwhile, in the real world, bookstore employees are doing what all retail workers do: lifting heavy boxes, standing all day, bending and crouching, dealing with bodily fluids in bathrooms, breathing in dust, and managing the psychic grind of customer service for wages that rarely reflect any of that. (The Bureau of Labor Statistics categorizes booksellers as retail sales workers like any other, and it’s a category defined by low median pay, high turnover, and at-times physically demanding work.)

It’s also not an accident that bookstore workers have been organizing in recent years. Barnes & Noble workers across the country have unionized store by store, often citing understaffing, low pay, and the physical toll of the job as central issues (there’s good reporting on this wave from Labor Notes. At Powell’s in Portland, workers have spent years bargaining over exactly these conditions—how much labor the job actually entails, and how little it’s historically been treated that way (the Oregonian has covered those fights in detail).

Tottenham’s narrator would probably scoff at all of this. He treats collective solutions with suspicion, seeing the bookstore less as a workplace than as penance — “a cruelly fitting form of punishment for not having done my own work,” as he puts it. He contrasts himself unfavorably with his manager, who “used the bookstore as a crucible of personal enhancement,” while he himself remains stuck, five years into what was supposed to be a stopgap. It’s true to a certain bookstore-worker archetype: smart, miserable, allergic to anything that smells like earnestness, someone who knows better and does nothing about it. (As I often “joke”: few workers are harder to organize than writers, trained as we are to reach for our own bylines over anything else.)

At one point, the narrator says, flatly, “Poverty and solitude have been the chief rewards” of his devotion to literature. You said it brother.

P.S. I have gotten VERY FEW submissions to Shift Notes. This project only works if people send me thoughts or stories or anecdotes or funny observations. Please email me at alexnatashapress@gmail.com. Thank you!