The Internet dealt a major blow by creating a massive single market for used books, undercutting the bread-and-butter lower end of the secondhand market. Like many memoirs, “A Factotum in the Book Trade” is a nostalgic book, wistful for the disappearance of bookselling-antiquarian books in particular, but also new titles-as a dependable, albeit never very remunerative, profession. “I cannot help but feel something has gone out of the life of the trade,” he writes. “Where is the American collector who wore a miner’s lamp on his forehead so as to enable him to penetrate the darker cavities of the bookshops he visited? Where is the man who came in asking not for books but the old bus and tram tickets often found inside them? Where is the man who collected virtually every edition of The Natural History of Selborne by Reverend Gilbert White? Where is everybody?” Kociejowski’s tone, though mostly wry, verges on lament. Some of them are famous, like Philip Larkin, who, as the Hull University librarian, turned down a pricey copy of his own first book, “The North Ship,” as too expensive for “ that piece of rubbish.” Kociejowski tells us how he offended Graham Greene by not recognizing him on sight, and once helped his friend Bruce Chatwin (“fibber though he was”) with a choice line of poetry for “On the Black Hill” how he bonded over Robert Louis Stevenson with Patti Smith, and sold a second edition of “Finnegans Wake” to Johnny Depp, of all people, who was “trying incredibly hard not to be recognised and with predictably comic results.” But more precious are the memories of the anonymous eccentrics, cranks, bibliomanes, and mere people who simply, and idiosyncratically, love books. “I firmly believe the fact of being surrounded by books has a great deal to do with flushing to the surface the inner lives of people,” he writes.
While Kociejowski recounts some of the high points of his bookselling career (such as cataloguing James Joyce’s personal library or briefly working at the fusty but venerable Maggs Bros., the antiquarian booksellers to the Queen), he above all remembers the characters he came to know.
The bookseller’s memoir is, in part, a record of accomplishments, of deals done, rarities uncovered-or, in the case of the long-suffering Shaun Bythell, the owner of the largest secondhand bookstore in Scotland, the humdrum frustrations and occasional pleasures of running a big bookshop. Kociejowski writes how “the multifariousness of human nature is more on show” in a bookstore than in any other place, adding, “I think it’s because of books, what they are, what they release in ourselves, and what they become when we make them magnets to our desires.” As Larry McMurtry puts it, in his own excellent (and informative) memoir of life as a bookseller, “Books,” “the antiquarian book trade is an anecdotal culture,” rich with lore of the great and eccentric sellers and collectors who animate the trade. His memoir is a representative slice, a core sample, of the rich and partly vanished world of bookselling in England from the late nineteen-seventies to the present. Kociejowski writes from the “ticklish underbelly” of the book trade as a “factotum” rather than a book dealer, since he was always too busy with writing to ever run a store. The best bookstores, precisely because of the dustiness of their back shelves and even the crankiness of their guardians, promise that “somewhere, in one of their nooks and crannies, there awaits a book that will ever so subtly alter one’s existence.” With every shop that closes, a bit of that life-altering power is lost and the world leaches out “more of the serendipity which feeds the human spirit.” “I want chaos I want, above all, mystery,” he writes.
Kociejowski dislikes the fancy, well-appointed bookstores that have sometimes taken their place. In London, his adopted home town and a great hub of the antiquarian book trade, many of Kociejowski’s haunts-including his former employer, the famed Bertram Rota shop, a pioneer in the trade of first editions of modern books and “one of the last of the old establishments, dynastic and oxygenless, with a hierarchy that could be more or less described as Victorian”-have already fallen prey to rising rents and shifting winds. “Will the day come where there are no more secondhand bookshops?” the poet, essayist, and bookseller Marius Kociejowski asks in his new memoir, “A Factotum in the Book Trade.” He suspects that such a day will not arrive, but, troublingly, he is unsure.
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