“Do I come off as arrogant?” — that’s what I asked my wife, known online as K.
“On your best days,” was the reply. (We get along, and know one another, well.)
I’ve been mulling over this question of pride for a while now, especially the past year at the store. On the one hand, so much has been fundamentally and fully depressing. For much of it, I drank too much in order to get through one day, so that I might get to the next day when I’d need another drink, and so on. I’ve poured myself excessively into work, rarely taking a break. I often feel insufferable.
Nevertheless, I take pride in what I do—and how I’ve managed, amidst the depression, intoxication, exhaustion, anxiety, and tedium, to do it this past year. Now, I’m not a medical worker on the front line. Nor am I an educator. I don’t mean pride in the societal value of what I do, but rather in the manner in which I do what I do.
In this case, I take pride in how I go about my job as a bookseller. What’s more, because I’m a fucking monster, I take pride in the fact that I have absolutely no expectation that other booksellers, whether they are full- or part-time, managers or not, link their sense of self to their work. I freely inhabit this “On the one hand” vs. “And yet, on the other hand” tug of war, and acknowledge that others inhabit it in different parts of their lives.
That said, I find that booksellers are sometimes a little too reluctant to be proud of what they do. Maybe the dissonance of what they’re been told vs. what they experience is just too much. Publishers tell us we are a key component to the very industry, and yet financial realities of our relationship never really reflect that. Or, for every one customer who makes a point of telling us how crucial our store is to the community, two are either using their camera to showroom for an online purchase and/or going out of their way to tell us they’ll have to get on Amazon whatever random thing they’ve just heard about we don’t have on the shelf that moment.
Retail of any stripe quickly breeds a certain cynicism, but over the course of the past year a heightened defensive antagonism has emerged in bookselling. Whether between booksellers and publishers, booksellers and customers, booksellers and management, or even between bookseller and bookseller … the tension of the times has made it difficult (at best!) to be proud of what you’re doing. Cold hard reality, we’re told by cold hard reality (perhaps, though, not always the most trustworthy source!), doesn’t allow for such sentimentality.
And yet, I carry on. I take pride even in that. I’ve chosen to carry on with the bookselling that I love. Which is to say, the kind that doesn’t center itself on chasing the sale that’s waiting. This inevitably happens, but in the bookselling I love it is incorporated in the effort to be the sort of bookseller that is worth waiting for. This means having good shit—the things a customer is looking for alongside the things they didn’t even know existed—but also creating a work culture that isn’t shit.
When I say that I take pride in my bookselling, it’s not because I (or my store) do this perfectly or all the time. The pride is in the effort . . . and it is in this work that I take pride.
What I’m Reading