Book Selling, Storytelling, and a Lifelong Love of Reading
by Jason Dickson
Working in used bookstores nearly all of my life has influenced my writing immensely. Honestly, I think it is the essential influence, apart from the typical hurly-burly of small town life. During my first job as a bookseller I was critically flabbergasted by the immense choice of material available in a used bookshop. Certainly I had devoured the basic books, the classics, the popular stuff. I had read Stephen King. I had read the Odyssey. All of this was read in my small town childhood home. But a city used bookshop offered titles not on any university syllabus, books that were forgotten, or just temporarily popular yet still very resonant (at least to me). My Talks With Dean Spanley, anyone? I'd have to make friends with people to know about these titles, yet there they were on the shelves of Red Ink Books in downtown London (n.b.: London, Ontario, also known as the second most popular London in the whole world).
Now that I own my own shop with my partner, Vanessa Brown—who is also a writer, and if I can speak for her, also deeply influenced by the chaotic pickings at used bookshops—the heft of choice is greater. Each week we're exhausted by the number of unexpectedly interesting books that come through the door. Cataloguing the more interesting ones always reminds me that there is not a person alive who has any complete idea of what style and genius is out there in books. Ignore the romantic proclamations of dusty shelves and candlelit, moldy, back-alley shops. The magic is in the choice present in a used bookshop. Whatever you think you may know will be rendered null and void by the wild, uncurated choices. This is good. This is essential. If you're a writer, you need to be challenged, in my opinion, not only by your own life but by the mass of stories told, both good and bad, and the lay and expert passion in any given subject. We are all humble amateurs in a used bookshop, and that is how it should be.
It takes you down to the essentials. Why should a story be told? What is at a story's center? What language is born from its desire to be told? Most importantly, who should care, and how will the story reach their heart? These are cheeseball questions, but they honestly strike the mortal coil of storytelling. As far as I see it, they animate the art. On its best days, my shop is filled with talk and gossip and folks sharing enthusiasms for this and that author, this and that subject. It is an exchange of the best kind. To me, stories are most often a focused, generative facsimile of this sort of exchange, and beyond the best-of lists, the new book market, and the "ought-to-have-read" guilt pile, a used bookshop's titles are a celebration of all that still could be in storytelling.
Used bookshops don't make sense. They shouldn't make sense. It's up to us to make sense of the lovely chaos, which is such a glorious opportunity, 500 years old and counting.
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