Every retail job has its liturgy, and in a used bookstore the evening service is the best one. At Quarto & Vellum the last half hour before closing had a sound I have not heard since and do not expect to hear again: the particular quiet of a room full of paper when the street outside is going home. Traffic noise softening. The radiator ticking. Somebody in Poetry, not buying, just standing, in the way that people stand in Poetry.
I worked there for eleven years, and for most of those years I was the one who closed. Closing a bookstore is a sequence of small completions. You square the stacks on the front table, which have drifted all day like continental plates. You reshelve the strays — and the strays tell you everything about the day you just had. A biography of Robert Moses abandoned in Cooking. A novel left on the poetry shelf, face out, as if someone had wanted it to be found by the right stranger. Children’s books everywhere, always, in drifts, like leaves. You learn the customers from what they leave behind, the way a detective learns a suspect from the ashtray.
Then the register tape, the counting of the drawer, the little arithmetic of survival. Here is what I will say about the money: there was never very much of it, and it was never really the point, and both of those facts were the store’s glory and its death warrant, in the end, at the same time. A used bookstore is a machine for converting rent into a public good, and the machine runs at a loss that somebody — an owner with another income, a landlord with a soft spot, a neighborhood that hasn’t gentrified quite yet — has to be willing to absorb. For eleven years, somebody was. Then nobody was. This is the whole story of the closing and I will not be dressing it up; it deserves better than a villain.
What I want to record instead, before I forget it, is what the store knew. A used bookstore is a neighborhood’s subconscious. New bookstores stock what people are supposed to want; used bookstores stock what people actually had, and gave up. Every shelf was an argument between the neighborhood’s aspirations and its estate sales. We knew when a marriage ended three blocks away, because the cookbooks came in — his and hers, redundant now, two copies of the same Marcella Hazan. We knew when someone died by the quality of the philosophy that arrived in liquor boxes. We knew the college kids were back before the college did, because the course books came in for resale in May with the highlighting barely dry.
People told the store things they would not have told a person. That is not a figure of speech: they would stand at the counter and address the shelves over my shoulder. I was asked, over the years, for books to read after a diagnosis, books to read aloud to a father who no longer recognized anyone, books to make a son fall in love with reading before it was too late, books to fall back in love with a spouse by, and once, unforgettably, a book “for a woman who has decided to stop being afraid, but only just decided.” I sold that customer The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd, and she came back a month later and bought every Shepherd we had, which was one.
The bookseller’s actual job is triage of this kind, and there is no training for it except shelving. You shelve, and shelve, and after some thousands of hours the store’s inventory installs itself in your hands, and then when the question comes — the real question, which is never quite about a book — something in you goes and gets the answer. I do not want to romanticize this. I also failed constantly: recommended wrongly, blanked at the crucial moment, sent people home with the clever book when they needed the kind one. But the failures were failures of a real practice, which is more than I can say for most of what I’ve done since.
The last night, we did the liturgy properly. Squared the tables that no longer needed squaring. Shelved the strays into shelves that would be empty by Friday, sold off to a dealer from Boston at so much a yard. I counted the drawer, and the drawer was actually good that night, because closings are good business — the neighborhood arriving all week to buy, at last, urgently, the books it had browsed for a decade. Every one of those final customers said some version of the same sentence: I can’t believe you’re closing, I love this place. They meant it, all of them. Love was never the store’s problem. A bookstore does not close for lack of love; it closes for lack of arithmetic, and the two facts have nothing to say to each other, which is the hardest thing about retail and possibly about everything.
I locked the door and stood outside on Wickenden Street for a minute, holding the keys I would hand over in the morning. Through the window the shop looked the way it had looked on ten thousand ordinary nights, which is to say: patient. A room of paper waits better than any room in the world. It was waiting when I left it, and in a certain sense — this is the only consolation I have found, and I offer it to anyone who has lost a room they loved — it is waiting still, dispersed across a few thousand shelves in a few hundred houses, every volume of it somewhere, being read or not, marked or not, remembered or not. Bookstores die. The stock is immortal. It just stops living together.