The Secret Lives of Booksellers

by Ann Foxen
Bookseller, Multilinguist, and
Children’s Book Afficionado

As the sun comes up over this Left Bank neighborhood, people walk their dogs and troll the local shops for the most intense cup of coffee and the flakiest croissants. The windows of the bookstore on the corner are dark, though, and only Bill is hard at work already.

He’d like to be at home in his garden—he has a massive project underway, turning a neglected side yard into a series of woodland/meadow/bamboo grove/flowerbeds, all connected by a series of bridges over a meandering stream. But he’s here now, sublimating, lining up the rows of
magazines like flowers in a garden plot, and listening to the bad news from all over the world as he does it. I think he got the idea from Candide.

Here come some more of the morning’s work crew. There’s Giancarlo, who used to buy books for the American Library before he came to work with us. The librarian there told me she thought he shopped for books around the city about 18 hours a day. The cavernous rooms under the library were piled high with his acquisitions. He manages our used book collection, to the same effect sometimes, but without the caverns.

I don’t know what Giancarlo reads. I’d like to know what books he has on his bedside table—or which ten books are at the top of the stacks that probably surround his bed. I do know that one day his red leather shoulder bag was lying open at the desk, and I saw a copy of Platform by that enfant terrible Houellebecq.

And Thérèse and Lola. Like Giancarlo, they’re so attractive that, if they weren’t so good at what they do, you might wonder if these tall, handsome people hadn’t been hired for their looks. Thérèse is studying Spanish for her trip to the Costa del Sol. Lola studies Italian. Giancarlo studies Lola.

Lola has an uncanny ability to judge books just by touching them. She’ll be shelving over in the art and photography section and you’ll hear her muttering as she pulls a book from her stack, “Bah! This isn’t photography, it’s pornography.” And you check it out (of course), and she’s
right.

Or she’ll say, “Oh, look at this….” And she’ll flip the book open to a drawing of a fly’s eye. And on the page below: “Begin by looking at something familiar, like this book, and ask yourself, ‘What would this look like to a fly?’…Do I see this object correctly? Does the fly see it correctly?” She flips it closed, and you see that she’s holding a copy of Karr’s Contemplating Reality: A Practitioner’s Guide to the View in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism. When Lola is shelving and you hear
that “Oh!” you know you’ll be taking a book home with you that night.

Lola reads absolutely everything, but everything, from Heidegger to children’s books. I wonder if Heidegger ever thought that he could count among his fans women with sparkly nose studs.

And here’s Hanako. She has a big laugh that burbles up from somewhere near the center of the earth, and every other expression she uses sounds completely original and surprising. She says something and everyone laughs, and she responds to their laughter with that big old laugh and they laugh again. Hanako studies things like documentary making and film editing. She’s got dimples.

I don’t often hear Hanako discussing books, but I’ve noticed what catches her eye while she’s shelving. I think the one requirement is edge. Like the Bad Dog, Bad Cat, Bad President series. Or Amy Sedaris’s I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence. Or Tobón’s Jackson Heights
Chronicles: When Crossing the Border Isn’t Enough.

Most of us can’t afford to live in this neighborhood or anywhere on the Left Bank really. There are some who live in student housing near the university, but most of us ride the Métro and/or the bus to get here. The one exception would be Aimée, who lives in a place she inherited from her grandparents on the Ile St.-Louis. She just skips across the Pont au Double and is here in a heartbeat.

Oh, it’s ten o’clock. Turn up the lights and unlock the door. Put some music on. And answer that phone!

DO NOT Unplug This Phone

By Jarek Steele
Co-owner, bookseller, webmaster,
co-op manager, e-mail manager,
bookkeeper, wielder of tape
measures and duct tape.


There is currently a questionable tomato resting in the
garbage can next to my desk. I put it there, not because I
found my office waste basket to be the most logical place
to put discarded food items, but because, quite simply,
there is no more room on my desk. The tomato traveled
from my home roughly three days ago, but I don’t really
recall which day it is anymore. As the late, great Janis
Joplin said, “It’s all the same day anyway.” I’m sure Kris
planned to use the tomato in a salad or layered on a
sandwich. She does that sometimes, packs my lunch for
me and I’m forced to alternate computer keystrokes with
lunchtime feeding.
On top of the garbage can is a three-ring binder filled with
old gift certificates we don’t use anymore, that I wanted to
use for contributions. But that idea was quickly discarded
because after spending some time on Photoshop designing
new certificates I realized that I was falling behind on
posting our bills. Those are piled in my inbox directly on
my spare packet of Effexor. I use the extras as a sort of
carrot to help me get to the bottom of my inbox every day.
Lately, though, I’ve been woefully behind in the bill posting
arena. Our phone system, which has served us well since
1988, has seen better days. When the phone near my desk
got tangled beyond repair, my attempt to replace the cord
was thwarted by the plug that had worked its way into the
depths of the phone. Neither paperclip, nor pliers nor
Andrea’s screwdriving skills made a difference. Later, on
the phone to Intertel, the manufacturer of the phone, the
customer service person asked what color we would like
our replacement handset to be. When I told her our phones
were the color of dirt and rubberbands she laughed. Hard.
After our Events Coordinator, Carrie, left to work at the
County Library, we decided to rethink our office space.
Get a new lease on life down here in the basement, er, I
mean executive suites. The “dark side” got a thorough
scouring, paint job and makeover. Design on much, much
less than a dime. I peeled old networking cables and phone
lines from their original spaces and fished them, duct taped
them, and plastic tied them along the ceiling and through
the concrete wall dividing the office bathroom and furnace
room. I’m going to have to make extra therapy
appointments to deal with the post traumatic stress from
putting my hand in that hole.


We surprised everyone with the new space and I decided to
finish the upgrade to our DOS based (yeah, you read that
right) inventory system complete with dot matrix (yep, they
still exist) printers. Piece by piece, we’re working on
actually having desktop computers that will simultaneously
access the internet and our inventory system, and— AND
have multiple screens! In the midst of my glee, the kind
folks from the phone company came by with their work
orders to switch all of our service to the new, and hopefully
cheaper, system.
As I write this, I’m somewhat hurried because I still must
work through the handwritten time sheet to do payroll
while listening to the co-mingling of dot matrix (we still
have it) and tape gun. After that I’ll update the staff picks
and try to get home sometime tonight.
Tomorrow, I’ll get up and do it all over again. After all, I
love this place like I loved my first car, a 1970 Ford
Torino. I had to bungee cord the doors shut, the radio was
broken and I had to put my foot on the gas midway
through a red light to get the transmission to catch on the
green. I still wish I had that car.
I heard a story about someone moving to St. Louis from a
larger metropolitan area. One of the reasons he didn’t
mind, he said was, “At least I know Left Bank Books is
there.”
This amazing group of people here at this store has learned
an intricate bookselling dance that begins when our
customers walk through the door, come to one of our
events, order on our website or call us on our
rubberbanded phones and it never really ends. Bookselling
isn’t about the machinery. It’s about the books and it’s
about people. And in that arena, I think, we’re light years
ahead of the pack.