The main occupation of a bookseller is observing the picking up and putting down, the accepting and rejecting and—with any luck—the purchase of a book. This is a less passive activity than you might expect since the bookseller’s taste, pricing, organization, and judgment is entirely in the hands of that prospective reader. Feelings, good, bad, and ugly are at stake. I can assure you that life in the book trade is not for wimps.

There are certainly other variables that contribute to the success or failure of a bookstore such as the cultural literacy of a community, the number of people with disposable incomes, and so on. One common characteristic is that buyers of books and readers in general are curious people who are looking for something, whatever that may be.

People come into a bookstore seeking everything and nothing. They ask for Proust’s Swann’s Way, Suzanne Summer’s autobiography, a first edition White Fang, and so on. This morning a guy asked for Cannonry’s A History of Scotland; a few minutes later a retired rancher asked for a 1945 edition (3rd) of Eugene V. Snapps’ Beef Cattle Production. People arrive expecting the widest possible range of printed material, from the utterly banal to books so obscure you’re sure you possess the only copy in America.

More to my surprise than theirs, I frequently have the book, the object of, their desire. It was an acute pleasure, for example, to have not one but two copies of Dr. Snapp’s intriguingly dense book. It was an equally acute embarrassment to have no adequate History of Scotland around the joint. McDuff sniffed twice before walking off in a little cloud of Highland pique. My Low Self Image (LSI) accompanied me all the rest of the day.

People also come in looking for nothing. “Are you looking for a particular book?” I ask. “Nothing,” they reply. So many people come in looking for nothing that I am tempted to publish a book titled Nothing. Then I’ll be able to say, “You bet! Got a thousand copies, hot off the press. How many do you want?”

Actually, I like the Nothing seekers pretty well. Mostly, these are folks who just like books and bookstores. They walk in, cast their eyes around, and case the joint the way visitors do when they enter an old fashioned hardware store for the first time, or a church rich in stained glass. They are waiting for a book to speak to them, to hear a hundred voices all at once, or maybe just one persistent voice. It is not nothing they seek, but anything that speaks to their moment and place in time.

I am also a victim of that persistent voice. Like every other reader, I have a moment and place in time that is a constant moveable feast. That voice is the source for the obscure books I buy that no one else will. I suppose it is a pathological condition requiring help from a mental health professional. Otherwise, why would I spend $9 to acquire Modern Library editions that are worth $5 wholesale and, at best, $10 retail? “Hey, Big Spender,” Willa Cather or Anita Brookner says, “come and spend a little time with me,” and I’m off to the races. Surely, there is a therapist among you who can help me?

Two adolescent girls, a traveling partnership I guess since they are always together, spend time with us every week. They grab a book, a soft chair, and curl up for an extended visit with James Joyce or Ayn Rand, oblivious to our creaky door and the occasional noise that drifts past it from the Square. The occasions of their visits are happy times for us. Sometimes we’ll watch them out of the corner of our eyes and become secret sharers of their discovery of a writer who was once a discovery for us as well.

In his poems about innocence and experience, William Blake captured the rose and thorn essence of adolescent discovery. We value both innocence and experience, yet we necessarily lose one as we gain the other. Consequently, I admit to feeling a slight parental-like regret as one of these kids picks up Sylvia Plath or Albert Camus—life is so much better than that! Yet I also know that becoming familiar with such depressive bores is a task they have to complete before thy gain enough life experience to confidently reject them. None of us are spared that sophomore year.