On the worst
and best things I was asked to do during my summer at a Waldenbooks.
There are
all sorts of reasons for those us who care about literature to resist creating
or reinforcing any strict or clear dichotomy between “literary” (or “highbrow”)
and popular literature, but perhaps the most significant is this: such a
dichotomy simply doesn’t stand up to any knowledge of actual literary history. Some
(if not indeed the vast majority) of the most consistently canonized and
studied authors, those whom we most associate with “literature” itself—from
Shakespeare to Dickens, Dante to Flaubert, Hawthorne to Faulkner—were deeply
concerned with popular success and sales; even those authors who were more
overtly and famously ambivalent about those questions, such as Emily Dickinson,
tended (as
did Dickinson) to hope for an audience, to work to find one, to seek
publication. To write, in many ways, is quite fundamentally to entertain those
hopes and goals (among many others, of course); and while they mean very
different things for distinct authors, eras, genres, and situations, it’s
simply inaccurate to suggest that they are relevant only to certain “popular”
genres or authors.
Yet if you
spend a few months working at a Waldenbooks, as I did in
Lexington, Massachusetts in the summer after my junior year in college, you do
come to see some of the least attractive sides to the business of popular
literature. Waldenbooks, like its main competitor B. Dalton (both of which are
no longer in business, forced out mostly by Amazon.com), was a prime example of
what I would call “mall bookstores”—small stores designed not for browsing or
discovering, and certainly not for reading or lingering, but for finding and
buying the moment’s most popular books. And one of my weekly jobs at the store
reflected those priorities with particular force—I was provided with a list of
particular books to pull off and our shelves, those that were not selling well
enough; and when it came to the mass market paperbacks on the list, I was asked
moreover to tear over the covers, return only them, and throw the books themselves
away, guaranteeing that they could never be legitimately re-sold. It was a
genuinely painful thing for me to do, piling all those books in a giant trash
bag each week—and it felt like the ultimate illustration of what a bottom-line
mentality can mean for bookselling.
That
mentality was clearly driving Waldenbooks as a corporation—hence my other
least-favorite required role, asking every
single customer if they wanted to buy one of our frequent buyer cards and being
rewarded or penalized depending on how many I sold. But it didn’t necessarily
drive my daily interactions in the store, my conversations with the customers,
and in fact those interactions tell a very different story. Time and again I
would be asked to recommend new authors or books, to build on an existing
experience (“I really enjoyed book X,” “I’m a fan of Y,” and so on) and help a
customer find new passions. The experience allowed me, after a few years of studying
literature in an academic setting, to remember the core of the literary experience:
pleasure reading, the enjoyment and power that creative works of all kinds can
and do provide for us. And it reminded me that at the heart of popular
literature is neither sales nor publishing, nor the bottom lines of
corporations, but the enduring and vital nature of that experience, on an
individual and a communal level. Sure, I would have loved to keep all those
cover-less books and leave ‘em in boxes out front, to find new readers as well;
but Waldenbooks renewed my faiths in reading and in books much more than it
undermine them.
Final
summer job connection tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Jobs in and around the literary or writing worlds you’d
highlight?
6/28
Memory Day nominee: Esther Forbes, the talented and prolific
novelist whose children’s
books, set both in her native
Worcester (MA) and in some of the most
significant eras of American
history, won her numerous
awards and have
continued to find an audience into the 21st century.
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