August 20, 2009

As my wife Linda and I exited the theater having just seen the wonderful "Julia and Julie" starring Meryl Streep as the irrepressible Julia Child, Linda turned to me and said, "Now, after seeing that movie, do we go home and cook...or write?!"

Both, as it turns out. She's making pasta with pesto, using fresh-cut basil from our small patio herb garden, while I am determined to research how to blog.

Except that my laptop refuses to be my usual administrative assistant and allow me access to the internet. I hate computers. I love computers.

Recently I clicked on "Upgrade Available" for Internet Explorer 8, trusting last year's computer guru when he told me to allow all possible updates. Yeah, right. Now I can't access the internet just when I'm pumped to get into this newfangled, non-old-school blog business.

I could leave this cozy sunroom with three of our four Siamese cats lounging around and go downstairs to my study to get online at my desktop, but right now the rain on the roof over the patio is such a companionable musical accompaniment that I'd rather sit here and begin a blog entry before I even know step one on how to reach all of you interested in a veteran bookseller's perspectives on books, reading, collecting, bookpeople, cats, life, and love...and baseball.
Besides, the aroma of Linda's ultra-fresh pesto simmering with garlic, pinenuts, parmesan cheese, and olive oil is too yummy for me to go further away from its source. Soon she'll serve it surrounded with slices of our home-grown red and yellow tomatoes for a fine August meal, even if it isn't in Julia Child's cookbook.

I've been blessed to spend more than four decades as a bookseller. I've been known as "Bookstore George" in a wide variety of bookstores -- on the sea, in a mall, on campuses, in an airport, and now for the last 10 years, at the Acorn Bookshop in Columbus, Ohio. The stores have specialized in college textbooks, travel books and maps, business books, current bestsellers, and in the used bookshops, anything that's ever been in print. The variety of my bibliopolic experiences has been awesome.

I was one of the lucky people who find out early in life what they want to do. When my Aunt Peg (more on her as my inspiration in a later blog) asked me in 1968 what I wanted to do with my life, I jokingly said, "Get paid to hang out in a bookstore!" She looked at me intently, her head cocked to one side and one eyebrow equally cocked high, and drawled out, "Well.....?"

Fourteen bookstores have been my professional home since that well-expressed "Well...."
As I've learned from hearing it from so many customers over the years, I was just one of the many whose dream it has been to own their own bookstore. And I won the lottery: bookstore #14 is the Acorn Bookshop, and I'm the co-owner.

Imagine being able to spend your days hanging out in a bookstore, surrounded by people who love to read and/or collect books. A bibliophilic staff and book-oriented customers that choose to spend their discretionary income on reading material. That's my very fortunate life.

"I've got a novelist's eye and a bartender's ear..." sings Jimmy Buffett on "School Boy Heart" on his excellent "Banana Wind" CD.

Being behind the counter in a bookstore is very much like being behind a bar -- you get to know a lot of your customers' lives. As they talk, I make notes, inobtrusively. I've been taking notes and writing stories about my bookstore experience for years, most recently in what I call "Bookstore-ies". Stories about life in a bookstore.

A few bookstore-ies have been published in the quarterly for The Aldus Society, Columbus' bibliophile organization. See http://www.aldussociety.com/ , and click on "Newsletters", then scroll through till you find my column, making mental notes to go back to the other articles of interest.

All told, I have 150-200 store-ies finished, and about half that many simmering in my Works in Progress folder.

I love working in a bookstore.
I love writing about working in a bookstore.

Hope you get to do some reading today. One of the most famous books about a bookstore is "Shakespeare and Company", by Sylvia Beach. Her bookstore in Paris published the first edition of James Joyce's "Ulysses". It's not well-written, but the scene of her asking back-to-liberate Paris Ernest Hemingway to clean out the snipers on the roofs of rue de L'Odeon in the Left Bank is worth the read.

Bookstore George

2009 copyright