I was what I would be if I wasn’t a writer: a clerk in a used bookstore. No other possibility. I worked in eight bookstores in fifteen years, five years during high school and college, then ten years straight after that. Shelving, running registers, re-alphabetizing sections, learning the arcana. I was bitter, intense, typical, believing myself superior to customers who could afford the best items I could only cherish in passing, part of a great clerkly tradition. I was certainly aware of the tradition. I still repair broken alphabetical runs and straighten piles on tables, absently, despite myself, whenever I’m in stores. It calms me during book tours. The last five years I worked at one of the best stores in the country. I was becoming an expert in the books I cared about most, modern first editions and rare paperbacks. In, say, another fifteen years of apprenticeship — a trifle in antiquariana, as with any serious guild — I might have been one of the top rare-lit men in the world.

Or it might have all gone south. Some clerks never make it, end up burnt out, start stealing books, like cops gone bad. They get hooked on tea, next thing they know they end up in a card game. Then a crap game. Then they wake up in a pool hall. Then this big Mexican lady drags them off to Philadelphia. They get a job as a “before” in a Charles Atlas ad. Then the big Mexican lady burns the house down and the next thing they know they’re in Omaha. They move in with a high school teacher who does a little plumbing on the side, who’s not much to look at but who’s built a special kind of refrigerator that can turn newspaper into lettuce. Then these clerks settle in, start scheming. Using the high school teacher’s know-how they begin printing up samizdat Gold Medal paperback originals by fake noir authors with names like Orphus Blurt and Crash Burnstein and Walter Girlfriend. You see these books come floating across the buying counter and you just grin: you know a haywire clerk’s out there, flaming like a shred of Korean barbecue. I think that’s probably the kind of clerk I would’ve become, after a while.

— Jonathan Lethem muses on his lost career, from Brick 71

For a time I, too, felt that my future lay in the used book business (despite the fact that “used book dealer” was not an option the highschool career counsellors knew much about). I knew I wanted books around me, and the used book business seemed a kind of paradise to me. There was no need to seek books out: people brought them to you: every day they showed up with their shopping bags, their cardboard boxes. They brought books to you, and you could pick through their offerings and offer them a paltry sum of cash (or more in trade). They would grumble slightly, eventually accept, and then the books were yours.

The potential savings staggered me. Through careful, silent observation I had learned that a used book doubled in price when offered once again for sale. Hence as a dealer I would be able to afford twice as many books as otherwise. Even better: I could read any of these books, and then resell it for more than it had cost me. To my naive, budding-capitalist brain this seemed an unimprovable path to fortune.

For quite a period in my teens I kept this vision of my future working life alive. I was obsessively building my science-fiction paperback collection, and would haunt the two used-book shops that existed then on Lonsdale Avenue. Both are long-gone now. Every Saturday I cycled in from Lynn Valley to browse through their new acquisitions. Art’s Book Den was my first stop: I still recall the thrill of finding a copy of the first edition Ace paperback of Dune in good condition; and a run of Analog magazine in the larger bedsheet format.

O’Day’s Books on lower Lonsdale was my next stop. O’Day (I never knew his first name) had a much shadier reputation than did Art. O’Day was the only man I ever met who habitually wore one of those green eyeshades that bookies wore in films. Every day. Inside.

He had an “Erotica” section (the books well-thumbed, and stained, no doubt) up by the till, and I’d heard he dealt in drugs as well as books: perhaps there was some secret code word you’d mutter if you were in the know and he would (shifty-eyed) reach beneath the desk to pull out a plastic bag and supply your needs.

It was not a glamorous profession. The few book dealers I’d observed looked seedy to a man (and all were men). Pale skin, with thinning hair; glasses, and nicotine-stained finger tips. Cardigans in muddy tones. I started to wonder how they’d fallen into this life, this line of work, for it had begun to seem more like the end of a decline than a career one worked up to.

So I chose the academic life instead: the fast-paced, flashy world of computer technical support. And oh! the things I’ve done instead, the cutting-edge gadgets I’ve been allowed to touch! A far cry from the paper-tape calculators of the used-book biz; a far cry indeed…