cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I am buying a bookstore. I have been asked to take ownership of the bookstore. A few months ago I started working there two days a week as a temporary thing while another employee was at a writer's retreat. Just for a few extra bucks and I thought it would be fun to hang out at this bookstore that I've been going to since I was in high school. It's been written up as one of the best used book stores in the US, is listed in a book about the best book stores in the world, and the W@shington Post called it "the best used bookstore south of The Str@nd." The owner is in very poor health. He has MS and various other ailments and is 80 years old. Sixteen years ago he got stuck in a wheelchair and hasn't been able to go anywhere in the store other than the front room since then. From that time, nobody working there cleaned anything or straightened shelves or organized or fixed anything whatsoever. He had no idea how bad things had gotten, but everyone else knew. The crumbling plaster of the 1900-era building's walls were piled on rows of books. Very little was alphabetized. The floors had not been swept in over a decade. There was trash stuffed among the books. This was like an episode of Kitchen Nightmares, with books. So I Mary Poppins the fuck out of it. I fixed the leaking air conditioner spraying water. I cleaned out the window wells in the basement that had filled with dead leaves and compost. I cleaned and organized everything. I bought a vacuum cleaner. I learned where pretty much every one of the 100,000 plus books are located so that I could help visitors find what they were looking for. I re-organized sections, created new sections, culled un-sellable books, identified rare and antique books and first and signed editions and re-priced them. I have gotten next to zero writing done during this time, but it paid off in an unexpected way. The owners wife approached me and asked that I take over the whole thing. This is a piece of real estate in downtown Ch@rlottesville that would easily be worth around $2.5M on the market. They can't handle running it anymore. They had assumed that it would just die when the owner dies (and that could be any day now), but what I've done in the last few months has given them hope that the right person could keep this institution alive. So they offered to sell it to me with owner financing for $1.2 million and a six to 12 month grace period of only paying interest while I do all of the other things I want to do in order to bring revenues up. It has enough extra storage space on the top floor to turn into an apartment that I can live in for a few years, and probably rent out for $2k a month or more at some point. I just have to renovate it and build a kitchen and deal with the crumbled wreck of a full bathroom up there which has been blocked off with bookshelves for 30 years. The book store has a bunch of elderly friends of the owner who work as volunteers. This place is sort of their clubhouse. Guys from around 70 to 86 years old. One is a former N@tional Geographic photographer, another owned a financial data company that he sold to Standard & Poors a while back. That guy, the 84 year old, likes to sit down in the vintage swan chair near the front desk and talk about selling peanuts at Fenway Park as a teenager. One guy owned a wine business and various other businesses and has offered to come in as a very small minority owner of the store with $30k in capital that I could use to get the place in proper shape. We have a meeting in the next week where we're all going to hash out the details. The bottom line is that I am about to own a very expensive piece of real estate and a book store and an entire community of people has decided that I am the only man they can trust to save this thing that they all care about. This was not something that I had even remotely asked for or looked for. But nothing much else has been working out in my life in general. Being handed the keys to a building and a business with an apartment downtown is not something that I'm going to turn down. It turns out that I am really good at running a bookstore. I know enough about literature, science, history and art that I can act as a sort of librarian and research consultant for almost anyone who comes in. I used to collect rare and antique books so I can ID and appraise the stuff that we should be selling online. I'm capable as a carpenter, mechanic, plumber and electrician within certain confines (I'm replacing light fixtures and outlets, not fucking with the fuse box). I can find almost any book in the building within ten minutes or so. I think that I can up the income. Only fiction, poetry and biographies are alphabetized right now. We lose sales every day when people come in looking for something and it isn't in any order. Alphabetized all of the things. Except art books. I'm not sure what to do there. The store is located on a corner and there is no indication on the primary street that there is a book store there. I'm going to remove the shelves blocking a double window there, build out the window ledge and set up seasonal displays. Our hours are noon til six every day. That only gives 9 to 5 workers less than an hour to come in. Stay open til 7 or 8 at least on Fridays and Saturdays, maybe more, and that could be a 25% increase in sales. A lot of our stock is badly priced because the owner has been pricing books for years. He has days when he is lucid and recognizably himself and days when he is not. For scale, a used paperback work of popular fiction in very good condition should be priced at $7.50. Some days he might ask me to price, say, "Infinite Jest," at 95 cents. As if this were still the 70's. Other days he spits out $15. He prices current Scholastic editions of children's books at $6.50 when they sell brand new at a school book fair for $2.50. So of course we don't sell any of those books at all. The buying of books is entirely divorced from the reality of books that anyone wants to purchase. The owner has authorized one other employee to buy and price books. This guy, Peter, works weekends and has for about ten years. Peter thinks that he is the manager of the book store and cops an attitude towards everything I'm trying to do. Peter is in his early to mid sixties. Peter thought he was the manager while the book store fell into a state of total en-shitification and he never cleaned anything or straightened anything or fixed anything nor directed anyone else to do so, resulting in my having a very low opinion of him. We have a foolishly large Christianity section within the religion section. Probably about 20 running linear feet, on bookshelves six feet tall. We sell maybe six to ten books a week from that section. It needs to be cut back. Right when I started, Peter bought six more crates and boxes full of books for that section which are piled up on the floor because there is no room to shelve them. Then last weekend he bought three more. This fucking dipshit has no idea how stupid a move he made, because he never bothers to shelve books and doesn't even know that this section is already overflowing. He just sits at the desk all day, never getting up to help anyone find anything. Neither he nor the outgoing owner ever look at the written log of books sold to have an idea as to what people are actually buying. He just sees books in front of him and buys them in. Peter has to go. This will be a whole drama once I own the store. It will be hard to get a reliable person to cover weekends. But this lazy dipshit has to go. All of that shit needs to be fixed. I want to send all of those crates on the floor and about 60% of the Christianity books on the shelves to Goodwill. And then use that shelf space to either expand biography or hardback fiction. Fiction actually sells, probably to the tune of at least 60% of our sales. The outgoing owner has never read science fiction or fantasy, so he never made much room for them. People come in all day long looking for that section. It is currently limited to room for only about 2,000 titles. The room that stuff is in also houses around 3,000 dramatic scripts, which are not alphabetized and half of them are actor's copies with no writing on the spine with no way to browse them and we sell maybe ten a week at best. Also health and medicine books are in there, and we don't sell shit from that category. So it's probably time to cut the fuck out of drama and health and expand sci-fi and fantasy. Upstairs, in storage, there is an entire room filled with science fiction books that we should be selling. Also I need to just get them the fuck out of there because I have to use that space to live in. And the prospective living room is filled with thousands of issues of lit mags from the last century that I hope I can get some university to acquire. I think that I can fix this. It is a scary challenge. I have to increase revenue enough to cover a $3k loan payment every month. I want to get carried away with building the new kitchen and gutting the bathroom and decorating this apartment. But reality is that I have to turn this business around and find ways of selling a lot more books than we have. That needs to be the number one thing on my mind. If I can't pull that off then I won't have the apartment to live in anymore. This might be a white elephant. I don't know. It is a chance. If I can pull this off then I have a place to live and a job and ownership of a piece of real estate worth far more than I am paying for it. The idea of buying something for $1.2M feels absurd to me. I have around $500 in the bank right now. Everyone involved in this deal is investing in me as a human being. That is weird to me because I feel entirely without value. I remind myself every single day that nobody wants anything to do with me. Nobody wants to talk to me, or hear anything that I think or have to say. Nothing that I do is valued by any person. I am irrelevant. My existence is pointless and there is no reason for me to exist. There is no place for me in modern American society. I am not a real person. The real people have spouses and health insurance and houses and 401Ks and someone would call 911 if they disappeared. I write things and millions of people read what I have written and it usually does not matter. I provide ten minutes of entertainment and then they go back to golf or fantasy football or watching The Office or whatever it is that real people do. I still believe that this is true. While it is probably a fact that if I had never existed, certain elements of ecology would be in a shittier state, nothing I have ever written or done has been of enough value to provide me with a living wage for more than a year at a time. An old friend has died. His wife as a friend of my mother's. He was in his mid-70's. Jim N0vak. Jim was the first person to sort of show me how to shoot a rifle. His daughter was my sister's best friend. I fucked her on her 18th birthday. She's an editor for some dumb online thing in NYC now. Lie, The Bustl3 or something like that. She just got engaged to someone. Jim collected first editions of H. Rider Haggard. He'd owed a recycling business in NYC and made some money and then got out in the early 90's. He had majored in zoology and had a posture like he'd seen much of the world. I'm as old as he was when I first met him, and now I know that he hadn't He saw NY and New Jersey and Bard College and then got married. I saw more of the world by the time I was 38 than he did in his whole life. Jim had presence. He could say things in a forceful, emphatic way that seemed to mean something. I suppose that he probably had that talent when he was 20 as much as he did when I was in high school and his daughter was in middle school. But in retrospect, he was just an ordinary man who was good at saying things emphatically. As he aged, into his fifties, his sixties, his seventies, he hadn't seen or done or known anything more than what he'd started out with. You have to work for doing things that move the needle after a certain point. There is a tendency for men after forty to tell the same stories again and again and to live in the past. I have been terrified of being one of those guys for a long time. I keep doing new things because of that. Alex. Her (ex) girlfriend texted me out of the blue last week asking me, "did you have sex with Alex?" Yes, or course, how else do you think that she was pregnant? Then Alex emailed me from her work email, asking me to please send me an email saying that we didn't have sex so that the bad Lindsay can intercept it and stop banging on her bedroom door and perhaps move out. Whatever. You have to be some kind of dedicated NPC to live in that world for that long. I am literally having trouble thinking of Alex as being as sentient as the cast of Westworld at this point. She is aware of the stimulus directly impacting her. Anything beyond that is abstract. Alex is like a robot stuck in a loop. There might be some seed of consciousness in there, but it is not worth devoting your life to nurturing it 4:29 a.m. - 2023-09-09 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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