Being a Bookseller Isn’t What It Was

Every Christmas, I throw off my doctoral gown, slap the monographs, the Collected Works and the many-volume Letters back onto their library shelves and uncloister my bibliomania for a seasonal stint at the local bookshop. What pulls people like me into bookselling – even if only for a month during the holiday seasons – is not the famously slim pay, but the chance to put their love of books in the service of others. The pleasure of selling a book whose power has been felt in one’s own life – the delight, in other words, of making a present of something good and consequential – more than makes up for the low wage.