They didn’t seem to be noticing, so he let himself go, discussed books by the dozens—books he had read, read about, books he had never heard of, rattling off lists of titles with the facility of a Brentano’s clerk.
From
The Early Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
In the early 1990s when I was earning a precarious living as a freelance editor, I decided to get a part-time job to bring in a little Christmas money. One of my friends had done it a few years before, so I thought I could manage it too. I’m not sure how I found out there was an opening at the Brentano’s bookstore in Reston Town Center, but I applied and was hired.
Little did I know that the job at Brentano’s would turn out to be the most fun job I ever had. To be sure, the jobs I held both before and after that were much better paid and rather more prestigious—but Brentano’s was the place I loved.
The store stood at the corner of Fountain Square, across from the rink used by ice skaters in the winter and roller skaters in the summer. It was catty-corner from Clyde’s Restaurant and up the street from the cinema: frequently we sold items that were in some way related to the movies that were playing at the theater, especially the children’s films.
The wage was abysmal, but it was regular and there were weeks when even the little bit of money I earned for 20 hours’ work (minus taxes) was welcome.
Books, of course, are in my blood: after my father died I inherited his library, which meant the living room of my house consisted of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on three sides. (This impressed my resumé clients mightily when they came to be interviewed.) Just entering a bookstore sends me into a trance, the kind of “otherworld” some experience when they hear glorious music or gaze on a spectacular painting. Like Browning’s duchess, when in a bookstore I “liked whate’er I looked on and my looks went everywhere.” To gaze upon shelf after shelf of books on many splendid subjects was bliss of the most exquisite kind.
After working there for a couple of months I began to wonder why I bothered to accept a paycheck at all—I might as well have handed it straight back to them. We clerks were offered a one-third sales discount, so I bought book after book after book. Some time later I learned we were also permitted to borrow two books a week, as long as we returned them in excellent condition.
But even more than the product, I adored working with the other booksellers. All ages—late teens to senior citizen—all with different personalities, they fascinated me. I loved the way they’d talk about ideas when business was slow. In other jobs I’ve held, people talked about their kids or their bosses (and how both drove them crazy); their office colleagues or their significant others, or about some other mundane subject—diets, hairstyles, traffic. None of the conversation was amusing or memorable.
One’s colleagues at the bookstore were different. “I was unpacking a box of books in the back room the other day, and I found a book about string theory. Opened it, started glancing through the first few pages, and do you know…”
It might be astronomy, or poetry, or classic nonfiction; it might be A Room of One’s Own or Room at the Top, or A Room with a View—whatever the category, my colleagues would have something stimulating or interesting to say about the book they’d just investigated.
Certain incidents from my time at Brentano’s stand out in my memory. Occasionally men would come in and shove a copy of Playboy or Penthouse across the counter so I could ring up the purchase, glancing slyly at me to see whether I looked shocked or disgusted. To deny them the satisfaction, I kept my face as bored as possible, not even making eye contact with them—as if I had no idea what kind of magazine they’d just bought.
One of the things I appreciated was that my colleagues were so knowledgeable. It happened that a young woman came up to the cash-wrap desk with an armload of books that she’d said she’d bought, taken home, and realized they weren’t what she’d wanted at all. She wanted her money back. Nonplussed, I glanced at the colleague standing next to me. As smoothly as if he’d rehearsed it, he looked at each book, pointed out that Brentano’s didn’t even sell those editions, that our proprietary store number was nowhere to be found on them, and that wherever she’d bought them, it wasn’t at our store. She stood listening, flushing darkly, and finally flounced out of the store.
“Desperate to make money to support her drug habit,” my colleague said dismissively. “Some of those books were 20 years old. Might have taken them from her parents’ house.”
That impressed me greatly—such a theory would never have occurred to me.
On another occasion, a sale involved an extremely complicated transaction that required a great many codes to be entered into the cash register. My manager, seeing how flustered I was, spoke to me in a low, calm voice, telling me exactly which codes to use step by step. The look of gratitude I turned on him for saving me great embarrassment would have melted snow. At any rate, he always had a soft spot for me after that.
In turn, I tried to save others from embarrassment, especially the child customers. When they’d come to the cash-wrap desk with a book and laboriously count out the cash to pay for it, sometimes they’d come up short. I took to carrying a dollar or two in change in my pocket so I could make up the difference. “Oh, you’ll pay us back the next time you come in,” I’d tell them. “And if I’m not here, put it in there for the kids.” I would then indicate the donation box for a children’s charity. I wanted the children to associate the bookstore with nice people who were eager to help them. Sometimes the kids would leave the bookstore and return 10 minutes later with a parent who would pay the necessary amount. After they left I would put whatever the coins were into the donation box myself.
That “Christmas job” lasted a year and a half. In the end my husband asked me to resign as the bookstore hours were beginning to conflict with the increasing number of editorial assignments coming my way. He pointed out with perfect truth that editing paid five times the hourly wage I was earning at Brentano’s, so I agreed to stop working there.
Blissful Brentano’s, which had occupied the corner store in the Town Center for years, was taken over by Waldenbooks, which in turn was swallowed by another bookstore chain. Bookstores kept eating each other like big fish swallowing little fish until finally there were no more of them. Where I live we used to have Crown Books (which evolved into Books-A-Million), The Little Professor, Borders, B. Dalton, Barnes & Noble. Now there are no bookstores in my area except one store that sells used books.
These days, when I pass the location of what was once Brentano’s and is now a purveyor of “fine eyewear,” I look back wistfully on my time there and remember how much fun it was. But it seems, like my other enthusiasms—the Due South fandom, the Howard Dean campaign, the clinic defense days—that time is gone, never to return.
Oh, those were the days!