Closing Plup
This is what I’ll miss. From my smoking spot on the front step of the store I am like a webcam, observing North King Street. From here I engage with the community, and I’ll miss these people, all of them, even the annoying old Greek printer next door, and his sons – the idiot son, who is amiable, and the dapper son who looks like a member of the Mafia. I’ll miss the American architect next door who I talk to about American authors like Phillip Roth, and who always gives me friendly lectures on my smoking, telling me how his father died from it. His own addiction is Coca-Cola – he unloads crates of it every week. I will miss my xerox conversations with Whistle Man, miss hearing my favourite routine, “Whistle Man keeps his eye out for shoplifters and offers them his fist”. I will miss his crazy plans for how I should protect the five dollar books from the wind with panels of clear plastic, and I will miss his estimates of how many books are in the store: “Must be millions, eh?” I will miss the way he terrifies parents by whistling birdsong to their captivated children. The other day he found a magnetic advertising calendar on the footpath and asked me what month it was, was it February? It was March, I told him. The thought of Whistle Man puzzling over the suddenly empty store makes me sad. I will miss the community of shopkeepers: the nice Thai people next door, who I don’t talk to much, but who rescued my five dollar rack the time I idiotically left it out for the night, and who came running in the other day, when there was a blackout, to check if our power was off too. I will miss talking about the state of business on North King Street with Doris at Ice and Slice. I’ll miss Ray, everybody’s favourite customer: an old school gentleman who looks like a broken down roadie, the only customer who ever gave us Christmas cards.Within these walls I have been through so much, and my feelings about Plup are so mixed. Plup came along at a time when I didn’t know what I was doing and it gave me direction. It helped me to re-engage with people, and then eventually it made me not want to engage with people, and I had to remove it from my mind so I could like people again. What happened was this: I found out that I could never have the store I wanted, that it was too small and the rent too high, so I had to turn over books quickly and cheaply. And mostly what people wanted were the same half-a-dozen books and authors – all those university students I had wanted to please – and those books were all still in print, so you couldn’t ask much for them even when you found them, so I never had them in stock. I found myself telling people constantly, “No, we don’t have that... no, no, no.” I wanted to explain to them that I did understand, that I knew who those authors were, and why they wanted them, and that if I could I would have them available constantly for five dollars. I would try to demonstrate this by answering people’s title requests with the author of the book. “The Vonnegut? No, we don’t have any Vonnegut at the moment.” But this confused people, it elevated their hopes momentarily and dashed them again. And disapointing people, and people’s failure to understand why I couldn't give them the books they wanted, at the price they wanted to pay – the innocent misunderstanding of the customers, which was no different to what my own would once have been – made me turn away from people for a while, and for a while last year it even made me turn away from my friends, so misanthropic had I become. And I had to work to overcome that.
It took me as a person who had romantic ideas about books and literature – a person who would once have been appalled at the thought of destroying books – a person who measured a book’s worth by the merits of the words printed inside it – and overlayed onto that a different value system. The value system was not independent of the worth of the words in a book, because that is always a factor, but there are so many others. For a while I enjoyed this – in many ways I still do – but it changed the way I view books. I developed the bookseller’s gaze – in the presence of a bookshelf I continue talking, but my eyes steadily wander across the shelves, looking for treasures. All booksellers do this.
It gave me a trade that I cherish, an arcane knowledge that I learned well. My knowledge is strong – I am now very good at this, I can find other dealers’ mistakes and profit from them; I can do this in famous second hand bookshops, because everybody makes mistakes, and this is how one measures skill in this trade. Any half-decent bookseller can make money from well-chosen books at a book fair or auction or op shop, but it takes real skill to spot a book that a colleague has grossly undervalued. It is a good thing to have a trade, and I could do this in any English speaking city – give me a few dollars capital, and I wouldn’t starve. Give me an internet connection and I could make a decent weekly wage on Ebay.
It gave me a mentor I greatly value who selflessly imparted to me knowledge, in the manner of trades. And I was a willing and appreciative pupil, and I tried to give back whatever it is that apprentices give to masters that make this timeless transaction mutually worthwhile.
Over drinks one night this mentor helped me work out a plan – a plan to serve my time and gain my knowledge, a plan to acquire a large number of books and catalogue them for internet sale. He told me I was otherwise unemployable, which is his way, and not true, exactly. Except it is, because I wanted to have time to write, because that’s still the thing that is most important to me. And so my plan was to spend a few years acquiring and cataloguing books for internet sale – which is really just an old bookselling tradition made modern, the tradition of the mail order catalogue – so that I would be able to greatly reduce my workload at some future point, and still have a good income based on those years of work, and I would be able to spend my time writing. And it worked, and that’s where I am now, and it’s great. But I didn’t write much in those years, because my head was too filled with work, and I was too tired at the end of the day. And I felt alien to myself for quite a long time. And I don’t know what I might have written in those years if I’d done something else – I’ll never know – and that was hard for me.
And that’s why I have mixed feelings about Plup.
And now the shop is emptying, the catalogued books are all boxed and stored away and we are selling off what’s left of the uncataloguable shelf-stock for a dollar a book, and people are taking it away in great piles. I thought I’d find this sad, but I’ve found myself, the last couple of days, going in to work even when I didn’t need to, to watch it happen. I’ve been more chatty with customers than I have been in quite a while. The acoustics of this place change as the books disapear, it becomes more echoey, and soon this will be distant from me, and this shop will be something new and bland. I have been moved by how many customers have told me they will miss it. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad bookstore after all. There was always something good to read for not very much money, if you were willing to step outside what was currently fashionable with the university set – we were never out of Scott Fitzgerald, J P Donleavy, Lawrence Durrell, and plenty of other people worth reading. And these comments from customers have made me feel good. Sometimes they phrase their appreciation in a specific way that leaves me wordless, an innocent comment that I don’t know how to answer. “It’s a shame you’re going,” they say. I shrug and say some empty platitude; I can’t explain.
posted by Nicholas @ 11:44 PM
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