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!