A Bookseller In The City
undiepress.com | Sep 15th 2010
Confessions of an Indie Bookstore Clerk
by Karen Lillis. Updated monthly.
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>From age 27 (the age that rock stars die) to age 35 (the age that women stop
>stating their real age), I had the privilege of working in St Mark’s Bookshop
>in Manhattan’s East Village. Books had always mattered to me and still matter
>to me, but it was never more true than during those years. During my
>near-decade as a bookstore clerk (1997-2005), books were the stuff of my daily
>life, and not only because of the obvious over-the-counter transactions. My
>friends were bookshop employees and bookstore hounds, and my friendships
>revolved around the books we recommended to each other, enthused about, lent
>out, insisted be read, threw across the room, and gave each other with
>heartfelt inscriptions. When I was in the red, I looked for ways to sell books
>on the side of my dayjob as a bookseller. My therapy sessions usually started
>with, “So, I’m reading this new book….” My retirement account was a pile of
>stowed-away books which I hoped would increase in value. Days off were often
>spent at used bookstores. Weeks off were spent in the bookstores of other
>cities: A cross-country reading tour with my self-published novel, or the time
>that I slept in a famous European bookstore for eight nights. My 29th year was
>spent assembling my novel with gluestick and paper and staples, over and over.
>My 30th birthday was spent in a room full of a certain bookseller’s favorite
>first editions. To travel at Christmas was to take a cab to Penn Station with
>a large suitcase filled with gift-wrapped books and a small backpack of
>clothes. My most steady companion during those years was a seldom-employed
>poet who spent almost as much time browsing in bookstores as I did working in
>one, and had a knack for befriending bookstore clerks like me.
The application at St Mark’s was very simple. The front desk clerk handed you a
xeroxed page, which you could fill out in the store or at home. One side asked
for your contact information, education, references, and any prior bookstore
experience you’d had. Then it asked you to make two lists on the blank
backside: A list of your 10 favorite books, and a list of 10 books you thought
a good bookstore should have. Seemingly easy and innocuous, these lists were
the first line of weeding, and showed the owners how well you understood what
they were selling.
So what were they selling? One time a customer, a middle-aged lady who seemed
bright but possibly from out of town, walked around the shop in bewilderment
for a while before asking me, “What is the theme of this bookstore?” Not
wanting to hesitate, I quickly came up with, “Basically, post-chaos theory.” I
came to think of St Mark’s (which opened in 1977) as one of the two beacon
bookstores of counter culture America, the other being San Francisco’s City
Lights. They were like two bookends, holding up the literary revolution that
the Beats had started in the 1950s and Grove Press had continued in the ‘60s.
In addition to lefty non-fiction, edgy novels, and French philosophers we
couldn’t restock fast enough, St Mark’s had a formidable paperback poetry
section, which took up something like seven cases of five shelves each, not
including anthologies or new titles. But in the front of the store, they
featured a display of coffee-table sized photography and design books,
including the popular Taschen art porn titles like New York Girls and Tokyo
Lucky Hole. At seventy-five dollars and up, they allowed the store a decent
profit—in a retail sector that offered far less of a profit margin than most.
Sometimes Diana the magazine buyer, who’d been at the store for many years,
likened the store’s business model to the corner magazine shops that dotted the
New York landscape: “They pay their rent with cigarettes and porn mags, and
after that they can sell whatever else they want to.”
Pornography in support of poetry. This was the successful model that Barney
Rosset of Grove Press had seized upon, after watching the Howl trial of 1957
and seeing it win not only a victory for freedom of speech, but a victory of
sales and advertising for publisher City Lights. Rosset proceeded to
systematically take to trial Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tropic of Cancer, Naked
Lunch, and others–winning their right to be published and largely putting
literary censorship in America to an end. Concurrently, Rosset’s Grove Press
and Evergreen Review (not to mention the Beats themselves) created a taste for
the sensational and the saleable in the avant garde.
These contradictions, this sort of buzz swirled around St Mark’s Bookshop:
There, the latest black & white photocopied graphic novel might cause as much
sensation as the latest full-color nudie book; the collected interviews of
William Burroughs might create as much attention as the hottest debut novel by
the hottest just-discovered author; a handmade small press poetry journal might
meet as much enthusiasm as a well-researched exposé on global capitalism. We
were selling the new and the newly-anthologized, shelving tomes that enticed
and screeds that critiqued, walking among aisles full of the freshest art and
literature alongside volumes of the recent and not-so-recent past. Like Allen
Ginsberg reviving Walt Whitman or Patti Smith channeling William Blake or Kathy
Acker translating Catullus, anything was fodder for extreme excitement or
renewed discovery in this retail bookstore located in the heart of downtown, in
the heart of the art world capital, in the heart of the city of publishing.
Sure, sure, everything great in New York “had already happened.” But even if
that was true, now it was packaged up for sale as a book, and there were still
all us young artists to feed, still all the young artists who kept following
our heroes to New York.
It was into this milieu that my coworkers and I landed. Many of us had ventured
to New York City from the hinterlands, hoping for our shot at artistic fame and
fortune. Musicians from Louisiana, Minnesota, New Jersey, and Connecticut;
artists from Upstate and Tennessee; a comedian from Scarsdale; a DJ from
Oregon; a photojournalist from Asbury Park; poets from Albany, Michigan,
Leningrad, Colorado, and South Carolina. As Patrick the store manager liked to
say, “I’m like Alex on Taxi—I’m the only one here who just wants to work in a
bookstore.” It’s not that anyone minded what you did or didn’t do art-wise, if
you were or weren’t on some fame-seeking trip, if your thing was reading or
writing or bird-watching or installation art–only that you followed what you
enjoyed. Like the Bukowski poem hanging next to the basement water cooler read,
“if it doesn’t come bursting out of you/in spite of everything/don’t do it….if
it never does roar out of you/do something else.”
I remember tackling Violette Leduc’s Mad in Pursuit and then dissecting it with
Jared (one of the musicians). Not because he was reading it too, but because
Violette’s subjects overlapped our most frequent topics of conversation: the
hunger for creative achievement, the lust for artistic notoriety, the struggle
with loneliness, the yearning to engage with our idols and enter the dialogue
with our predecessors, the striving to keep one-upping ourselves, and the
anxieties that plagued us in between successes both small and large.
Whether the artist/clerk in question was literary or not, books became a
currency for all of us. Books were how we found or deepened our friendships
with other clerks, books were the maps we traced of the art stars that had come
before us, books were how we named our feelings and put form to our yearnings,
books were how we imagined lives we wanted to lead and came across ideas we
wanted to explore, and books were our brushes with the famous and the infamous
who shopped at St Mark’s. The hundreds of glossy new books (and the artists who
bought them, and the authors who signed them) surrounding us at the store were
sometimes the symbol of all that was just in–or just beyond–our reach in New
York, depending on whether it was a good day or a bad day. So many of us there
were the kind of readers who longed for books we couldn’t afford, devoured
books we could, proudly stood as gatekeepers of the store’s shelves, delighted
in the revelations the books held within their covers, and believed that we
were changed for having read them. Books seemed to hold a power beyond mere
knowledge that we wanted to obtain, and how to get there was anyone’s guess—the
osmosis was mysterious, sometimes happening by reading, other times by handling
the book or digesting the flap copy or letting the pages fall open like the I
Ching, still other times by making eye contact with the author herself, from
the other side of the counter.
* * *
Editor’s Note: St. Mark’s Bookshop is alive and kicking and can be found here:
http://www.stmarksbookshop.com/
Original Page: http://www.undiepress.com/2010/09/15/bookstore-memoir/
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