Maybe it’s just in the nature of dinosaurs to think we are
indispensable. But as a wave of
leave-taking sweeps over the book industry, I’m reminded nearly every day that
we’re not just losing great people, but also their institutional memory.
A sharp bookseller with ordinary memory will recognize good
customers by name and recall the last few books they bought. Not to mention arcane details like ISBN prefixes and the quirks of publisher co-op policies.
The institutional memory operates at a higher level. It records slow-moving changes in tastes, dips
deftly into a deep pool of author and title knowledge, and remembers how the
latest subject fad turned out the last time there was a bubble for it. Typically, there’s a broad scope awareness of
the book world born of decades of interaction with publishers, authors, other
booksellers.
By definition, it takes years to develop institutional
memory, and it’s not just a skill that can be learned by simply trying
hard.
Many of the sharpest institutional memories are housed in the heads of the visionaries who opened stores in the 60s
and 70s because they couldn’t imagine a career in the world of business- maybe
the last generation that didn’t worship money.
Younger booksellers are stepping up at Indies all over North
America, bringing energy, digital smarts and their own kind of wisdom to the
industry. A decade ago I was pretty
pessimistic that the book business would survive the passing of the
dinosaurs. But having worked with some
of these twenty and thirty-somethings, it’s clear that they will survive our
departure. Yet it will take years for
them to rebuild the store memory that resides in the brains and hearts of the
old timers.
When I pitch Helen Vendler’s wonderful collection of essays
this month (The Ocean, the Bird and the Scholar), I refer buyers to her
previous essay collections for hints on how this one will do. Booksellers who instantly go to their
computers to see how they did with those titles often find that books published
in 1980 and 1989 don’t show up. (And you
weren’t alive then, I sometimes grimly think to myself.)
But the bookseller with the long memory (and a dozen lovely
people immediately come to mind here) will immediately recall these books, and
the selling of them, without reference to screens.
When MIT Press releases a new edition of the absolutely
transformative Bauhaus, first published in 1969, the long memories see the book
in the mind’s eye, and recall its fifty year life in the bookstore.
One of the most important books on the spring Harvard list
is a deeply felt memoir by a human rights activist lawyer- John Sifton’s Violence All Around. The book stands on its own
merits, but it seems relevant to me to point out his family connections: his
mother, Elizabeth Sifton, is a legendary FSG editor of enormous stature; his
grandfather, the theologian and public intellectual Reinhold Niebuhr, needs no
introduction.
Or so I thought. Both
of those names drew blanks with my buyers until I presented the book to Les
Kreyer- another legend- at Follett last week. Les immediately appreciated how these two
names would have influenced the author, and made the book more interesting.
Les is the
quintessential old school bookman- erudite, with sophisticated interests, yet
someone you’d be happy to have the proverbial beer with. When I pitched another book on the spring
list, Nick Sousanis’ Unflattening, “the first dissertation drawn in comic form”,
he compared it to the way Wittgenstein’s Tractatus was received in 1918. Not that Les was around in 1918, but institutional
memory!
Maybe I’m reading too much Modiano and Sebald lately, but I’m
keenly aware of ghosts, transience, and loss.
We’re on the cusp of losing a generation of book people. The young whip-smart staff now running
Seminary Coop in Chicago (and other stores) has access to tools we never
dreamed of to make bookselling profitable.
But it’s the handling of books physically, the “shelf awareness” that
comes from touching and reading the books and engaging customers about them,
that’s at least as important in building memory as blips on the screen.
Book people of a certain age are dying off, it can’t be
helped. My friend Adena, who spent a stellar
career in the book world, lamented the other day that the only time she
recognizes names anymore in the Publishers Weekly “Personnel Changes” column is
when there’s an obituary.
And as for retirements, who can begrudge the bookselling
lifers wanting some time to actually read?
It’s been a hard business.
So hats off to the new generation, and good luck. But don’t forget to remember, remember,
remember.
-
