Treat life like a trip to the used bookstore.
Bookstore Register #4
I'm a second-generation secondhand bookseller building the used bookstore of the future. Join me every other Tuesday as I learn the family business, curate news from the book industry, and celebrate books as the pinnacle of art and the foundations of civilization.
This is a short essay I wrote after being asked to craft life advice based on how I grew up.
Growing up, my Mom and Dad ran a used bookstore. I spent a lot of my life hanging out down there. Sometimes I was doing chores for them, but much of it I was just waiting around for them. The store is still around, built out of an old house with books exploding out of every square inch. My parents’ actual house is also chock full of books.
Reading filled much of my childhood. Dad had one rule for bedtime: as long as you're in bed with a book, you can stay up. I also spent a lot of time procrastinating my chores at home or at the bookstore by grabbing and reading the nearest book. Early on, I realized that any given book might have a sentence or paragraph in it that could dramatically alter the way I saw the world, no matter what it was about or how old or crappy it looked.
It’s hard to overstate the effect this had on how I view the world. My physical lived-in environment was jam-packed with these intense pockets of meaning. As I got older, I realized that most of the people who came into the bookstore not only felt the same way, but were also similarly filled with stories and meaning. There were the dreamers, the intellectuals, the sob stories, the recluses, the fanatics, and many other special categories of eclectic.
Growing up in a bookstore, I was conditioned to see characters, stories, and themes everywhere–and so I have. In this way, I like to joke with people that actually, “life is a bookstore.” You can find meaningful solitude, good stories, timely lessons, and big characters anywhere. You just need to know how to look.
I am back at the bookstore as an adult, working alongside my parents on some weekends. And people come in all the time and say, “I didn’t know they still had places like this.” And I think that the fact people don’t get to visit used bookstores as often is one reason so many people don’t approach life the same way.
Like life, a used bookstore may not always have exactly what you want. But if you practice a smidge of introspection, and leave a bit of room for inspiration and idiosyncrasy, you can usually find things you didn’t even know you needed.
Update
📚 Total Inventory 1,480 | Inventory Since Last Issue 0📚
This is the part of each issue where I explicitly update you on how the building part of building the used bookstore of the future is going. And how it’s been going lately is “quietly.” But I am getting back to a start and am reloading inventory. As I build up my own inventory, I set aside a couple of books I find particularly interesting to share here. Here are two I came across recently:
The Dream Merchants by Harold Robbins
One of my favorite things is coming across novels or books I’m unfamiliar with that used to be cultural touchstones. Harold Robbins is a name that I know because I’ve seen it so many times growing up in the bookstores. For example, I know The Carpetbaggers (as alluded to on the cover above) was a tremendously popular book with explosive sales due to his ability to just barely skirt (pun intended) the obscenity restrictions when it was published.
The Dream Merchants came first. Robbins is one of the highest-selling novelists of all time, but before he was a novelist, he worked in the movies. And The Dream Merchants is a love story that doubles as a “rags-to-riches” story of a nickelodeon operator who builds a great film studio. It is allegedly based on the Founder of Universal, Carl Laemmle.
It was also made into a made-for-TV movie in 1980 starring Morgan Fairchild which is now up on YouTube.
The Sword of Rhiannon by Leigh Brackett
Another of my favorite type of book to find when looking through inventory, are these old-school science fiction and fantasy books. The Sword of Rhiannon doesn’t have as much backstory except I love that it was originally published in 1949 as “Sea-Kings of Mars.” Here’s the synopsis:
Greed pulls the archaeologist Matt Carse into the forgotten tomb of the Martian god Rhiannon and plunges the unlikely hero into the Red Planet's fantastic past, when vast oceans covered the land and the legendary Sea-Kings ruled from terraced palaces of decadence and delight.
What’s your favorite kind of book to come across?
Links
I took some time off! In case you’re new, this is a series I started in the Fall of 2023 about my quest to join and build up the family business, a used and antique bookstore. This is exceptionally hard to find time for as a new Dad who’s employed full-time as a Professor and also writes, but this series is a way for me to make it a priority. Here are the first three posts from the series:
In Building the Used Bookstore of the Future, I share the story that started me on this journey and then a few videos of my family being interviewed about the bookstore.
In The Best Section in the Bookstore, I explain why the Paperback Section is my favorite section in the store, and share my first TikTok video tours of the store, and two videos from my favorite book reviewer.
In Two Stories from a Mom & Pop Bookstore, I asked my mom and dad their favorite stories from their time in the bookstore and recorded them here.
Each issue also features pictures and short writeups on some funky books I came across while building up the inventory for my own new bookstore location. Tune in for the next issue in two weeks!
Trying real hard to zoom in and take a closer look at what books are on those shelves👀
Wait! That synopsis for "The Sword of Rhiannon" sounds a lot like a synopsis for "John Carter of Mars."
I've always loved perusing the Science Fiction section of old bookstores. But I think my absolute favorite serendipitous treasure was a book called "An Exaltation of Larks," a book that tells what groups of animals are called, like a 'clowder of cats.'