Seven or eight years ago, I was attempting to write a guide to opening a used bookstore, a project that stalled out sometime during COVID. Maybe someday I’ll revisit the manuscript and see if I can make anything sensible out of it and try to turn it into a 99 cent Kindle e-book that will give decent enough advice to a few dozen people flirting with the idea of opening a bookstore.
Arnett & Son Books in Racine, Wisconsin, home of enough copies of The Things They Carried for every resident of the city
My brother is opening a bookstore in Racine, Wisconsin today. Arnett & Son is the fourth bookstore I’ve assisted, in some capacity, in opening (although my involvement was just a couple days of helping to shelve his inventory). Being in a bookstore preparing to open has given me the opportunity to reflect on the various stores I’ve been involved with over the years. I've now spent over two decades running three iterations of two bookstores, and I both feel like I know what I’m doing and have plenty of wisdom to share, and like a complete and total fraud who is merely getting away with it. “You mean I get to look through books, select them and then sell them and...that’s my job? And it’s enough for me to make a living?” It feels criminal.
Now, I suppose, the tradeoff is that I don’t have an in-ground pool or a pickleball court in my 4-garage suburban home, but luckily for me, I don’t really want any of that. Unless you know something I don’t, you won’t get rich this way. But what is the point of working or money? I don’t mean this is the hippie “Hey man, it’s just paper, we should be swapping my free verse poem for that bushel of grapes” kind of way. I definitely understand the necessity of gathering and hoarding money, but truly understanding the purpose of money is knowing when enough is, in fact, enough. But what should any of us want from a job or money than having enough to have a nice little life.
Passing on this life to have 200 copies of Puddn’head Wilson and some signed DFWs instead
But at the same time, I work very hard and a lot of hours, and whatever feeling I have that I am getting away with something is just some kind of internal guilt for finding pleasure in work when I know what the day-to-day drudgery of truly difficult work with a rotten boss hanging over your head is like.
It’s easy to look at someone like Jeff Bezos (my bookstore rival! Im coming for you Jeffrey! ) or Elon Musk, and say come on, this is a bit silly, how much money does one person really need? This is excessive, but they are just working on a different scale than any of us. One thing that I really hope to instill in our kids is that money is great and all that, but if the purpose of money is to create pleasure, then isn’t finding something in life that you truly enjoy and find meaning and purpose a goal in itself? I’m not trying to show you my balance sheet here and tell you how much I bring in annually, although maybe I should to discourage others from becoming my future competition, because it’s less than your average teacher salary after putting money back into building my inventory (I’m cash poor, but book rich), but, for the life I want, it’s abundance. And despite that it may look like I just read and click buttons on my computer all day, I do work very hard, and the fact that I enjoy that work doesn’t negate that, which is something I need to remind myself at times.
I was young and fresh-faced once…and in need of a barber
I just really love working in a bookstore and being surrounded by great literature and getting to have conversations with the kind of people who are interested in coming in a bookstore and browsing books in our current age. And being in a bookstore about to open, with all of the hope and anticipation of something new, and looking through shelf after shelf of great books that have been thoughtfully curated before the grubby handed public (😛) gets to grab all the Roberto Bolano and Elif Batuman is a welcome reminder of how fortunate I am to have gotten to do this for so long, and if all the Doom Sayers who have told me from day 1 of Book Castle that this is a dead industry and “no one reads anymore” and “kids these days” blah blah blah prove one day to be right, I have been so fortunate to do this for this long. Besides, all the cynics are wrong and have always been wrong, and there is no better invention than the book, it is the perfect form. They really knocked it out of the park with that one! And here’s a Hard Truth for the defeatists—the majority of my customers are the young people that I am told constantly told do not read, and big surprise here—the people who come in the store and bemoan the lack of readership among the youth these days—THEY NEVER BUY A DAMN THING!
Next week, I will start writing about each of my bookstore openings, and that will begin with the woeful tale of the first Book Castle, which ended in an explosion and fire that left 6,000 of the most mediocre books you could ever encounter in ash.
