My job is just book
On working at a second-hand bookshop
I think minding books is in my blood. My first career was as a librarian at suburban public libraries. My most recent job venture is working a couple of days a week at a second hand bookstore.
The librarian years resonate now, there are similar vibes. Book people are book people no matter the year or the physical location.
As I tidy the shelves familiar titles pop up. Everyone requested Mister Pip when it first came out, the reserve shelves were full of it. Now the shop has a stack of them in the back, waiting for the on display one to walk out the door, because it’s still popular. Of course there are new books too, a great wealth of things I’ve never heard of, but seeing books I’ve read and loved on the shelf is a warm experience, meeting an old friend. My urge to put my favourites on display is strong and I haven’t yet resisted it.
Have I come full circle? Not quite.
The library was a different animal. Working for a local government is very different to working for a kind bookshop owner. She let me close up an hour early the other day so I could rush home and do a remote author visit for a class of teenage writers.
The shelves in the bookshop are puzzles to be solved. The slightly haphazard organisation is by design, it draws in the treasure-hunters. The library had a labelled place for everything, and the books had their labels to show you where they belonged. Long hours were spent shelving off a book trolley, and setting things back in order.
My time at the shop is spent tidying, rearranging, sorting and pricing. The poetry shelve is overstuffed with verse from all over the globe. How I can arrange it? Make my first literary love more accessible? (I did a summer course in writing poetry once with Gregory O’Brian, I felt so fancy.) The other day a tourist with a heavy Dutch accent asked if I had memorised the names of all the poetry books in the wooden box because he was looking for something written by his … son? nephew? I had to apologise. No, it’s only my third shift at the store and also…. no. He gamely sorted through all of the thin books and came out with empty hands.
Every time I’ve worked someone has donated books. The back rooms are shelves and piles, in the store proper there are piles as well, it’s a necessary storage choice when the shelves can’t take any more.
“Would you be interested in a box of books?”
The small library in Wadestown was my first ever job. I worked four hours a week shelving books after school or on Saturday mornings. I think I was sixteen when I started there. It was a very small library but well used by the locals.
As the years passed I was promoted to an actual librarian instead of a shelver. Issuing and returning books, talking to people, looking things up on the catalogue. I’d shelve books when I got overwhelmed, it was my comfort zone.
I loved that job.
Handling books, memorizing the Dewey Decimal system simply by shelving so many non-fiction books, learning which fiction was in demand, what suddenly got popular, reading things I’d never have otherwise come across.
I also made friends with people older than myself. My coworkers, who were almost entirely women, almost entirely the mothering types. Then getting to know regulars, fathers who brought their kids in on the weekends, academic types ready to go off on a diatribe about their speciality, people who asked what I was reading, what I was studying. I worked at the library throughout my degree and for a number of years after ‘d finished it.
I left the library because I was denied my one ambition there. I wanted to be a Children’s and Young Adults Specialist. I was already regularly leading Preschool Storytime, class visits with local primary and intermediates, participating in a relatively successful outreach project to local high schools… desperately trying to make reading cool before Twilight, Divergent or The Hunger Games had come out.
I would have been wonderful at that job, but it wasn’t to be. I quit for a job at Trade Me, which led to a career in testing and then Agile. I love Agile because it resonates hard with my personal values, so well with my skill set I thought I’d found a home there too.
But, alas. Restructures, short term contracts, pandemic lockdowns, cost of living, recessions and ultimately Long Covid intervened. Over the years, it feels like that universe has said “not this, not now'“ to me. I can’t commit to the full time, multi-team demands of a lot of Agile opportunities right now.
But this?
This little bookshop in a suburb of Parnell? A job I was referred to by a sweet friend? This makes so much sense.
Throughout this essay I’ve been talking about my careers as something separate to my writing because I have always compartmentalised things that way. In all this time, through all those jobs, fiction-writing has gone from a hobby to a viable career almost. I go to markets, to the Armageddon conventions, I visit classes and talk about my books, I’ve earned the Bestseller ‘orange flag’ on Amazon, I have fans… but at this stage it’s not bringing in enough money consistently to live on. So, hard on the heels of signing my first contract with a publishing house based in the USA, I also accepted a job at a second hand bookshop.
It feels like coming home, somehow. Opening up the back door and inhaling that dusty, bookish scent. Tidying shelves, researching and pricing books that are donated and look nice enough to go on display. The other day I alphabetized the shelf of orange Penguin classics, and it took me no time at all. All those hours shelving at the library have made it a skill I can’t ignore. The ease with which I can lift an armful of books - all of it something I was trained for more than twenty years ago. Funny how life works.
Unlike some other jobs I’ve had, this one doesn’t ‘follow me home’. It’s something I can leave when I pull in the standing sign, flip the door sign to ‘closed’ and lock up. I can leave the books in the bookshop and come home with nothing to worry about. In fact, it’s rather inspiring in terms of my writing. How nice to have a job that inspires me to put more of my own books out into the world.
Who knows? Maybe someday one of my own books will show up on these shelves, and I really will have come full circle.
I really like the concept of a job that doesn't "follow you home". Currently I have 2 part time jobs. I follows me home, one doesn't. Never thought of it that way, but resonates! Thanks.