cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To Take Ownership of a Bookstore. For the last few months while working at the bookstore I have handled and researched countless literary magazines. I have the second issue of Wyndh@m Lewis's litmag, "The Enemy," published in 1927, which looks like a punk zine from 1979. A volume of poetry, "Meatball," with a cover by Robert Crumb. Throughout the Twentieth Century there were a range of publications that collected, defined and sold to the consciousness of people various artistic movements. An intersection of writing, visual art, philosophy and politics that helped to present and codify the existence of groups of people with ideas. Lit mags, zines, journals, whatever. I remember the last of these things in the mid-nineties. I even wrote and photocopied a few of my own, the last being a satirical thing in 2001. These don't seem to exist any more in any real organic, dangerous way. Sure, there are literary magazines, mostly put out by universities. I haven't seen a zine in a long time. There is no power of the underground small press, powered by access to a photocopier and friendly clerks at record stores and bookshops. Everything is through Facebook and Twitter and maybe Substack. Discrete musical, literary and artistic movements are not bubbling up through communities of like-minded people from the same geographic area. There could be no Seattle grunge scene today. The bands would all have to sign contracts preventing them from performing in the city within a month on either side of playing in a Seattle night club today. If that had been the case in the early nineties, nobody would ever have heard of Nirvana or Melvins or Pearl Jam or any of the others. A Harlem Renaissance would not happen today. A first great musician might blow up on Spotify, so long as they were a solo act, and be pulled out of their neighborhood context. A world tour. Pressed to collaborate with other existing big names. The poets and fiction writers and painters would be left behind. All of them would be spending most of their time trying to maximize their online followers, competing with most financially successful talent from around the world, rather than building a local scene of mutually supporting talent and audience. Every creative person now has to compete with the most financially successful people from around the globe, and with a set of algorithms created by autistic sociopaths, just to even hope to pay the rent. What would happen if someone, maybe me, made a zine and just put it out all over the place? Is there any hope for anyone getting out of the digital prison that every artist and writer and musician has been trapped in? I haven't used any social media in years. My experience of living in the world is probably different from that of anyone else I know. Today I sold a first edition of In Our Time, minus the dust jacket, for $100. Also a beat-up first edition of For Whom the Bell tolls for $20 to the same person. And within minutes of appraising an 1848 edition of The Arabian Nights, I sold it for $80. Then a first edition Virginia Woolf ten minutes later. All stuff that I plucked out of boxes that the out-going owner of the store was going to sell for $8.50 each. He and his wife have been scared of selling rare books for their actual value because they have this mindset of needing to sell cheap books. This town (Ch@rlottesville) has been so horribly gentrified that at least a third of the people who walk in to the store every day have a household income of over $250k. I can sell hundred dollar books consistently just by IDing them, presenting them properly, and having conversations with people about books. They are going to spend more money on a bottle of wine with dinner. The book is literally an investment and will appreciate like artwork. I am really, really good at this job now. Running a used book store which is increasingly specializing in rare and antique books. The specialization just comes from IDing rare books that are already in the stacks or among incoming books and appraising them and presenting them properly. I don't have to go shopping. There are well over 100,000 books here for me to play with. I have two employees who I've trained now and they do a pretty good job running around alphabetizing things and cleaning and replacing shitty books with more sellable ones within their knowledge areas. They have more fun doing this than if they had just sat at the desk for six hours at a time like staff used to do. There are only two other employees now, and only one of them sits on his ass and that is just on Tuesdays. The sale of the bookstore is taking fucking forever. I still don't have the clear three key numbers and the one number that comes of them: total sale price, interest rate, and term of years. Then the monthly payment. I can plausibly boost revenue by 40% within a six month grace period. If it is more than that, this isn't going to work financially. How do I get to a 40% increase in revenue? A list of small things. 5% by taking books that we are culling and sending to Good Will and recontextualizing them as a few shelves of $2 books near the front of the store. That gives people a reason to stop in once a week and buy those and also look around the rest of the store. 5% with an employee picks shelf, containing all of the weird, cool shit that gets lost in the stacks that we know is great but nobody will find once it is no longer within the space of the hip to one foot above the eye for most customers in alphabetical order. 10% by increasing foot traffic from the major city street that the store is at a corner of, by clearing out shelves covering a double window and adding a display so that pedestrians and drivers know that there is a bookstore here. 5-10% by placing a sandwich board on the D0wntown Mall, a block away, so that tourists on that bricked-over former main street know that there is a used book store up this side street. 5-10% selling the oldest and rarest of the stock online on Ab3books dot com. 5% from alphabetizing and organizing the existing stock. We hardly sell shit out of the hardback fiction and biographies and memoirs. I strongly believe that this is because the alphabetization of these sections is hopelessly fucked. They are supposed to go alphabetical along each shelf, top to bottom, then over to the next shelf on the right. Many past employees, trained by the fuck-up asshole Peter for 20 years, didn't know this and filed in either direction. The result is fake alphabetical order. You think that you have an author or a part of the alphabet because the letters around it look right, but actually this author is in three different places within eight feet of one another. I have started a great alphabetization, starting with A and moving through the entire alphabet in fiction hardbacks. People can't buy books that they can't buy. 5% by IDing and labeling all first editions, signed books, and rare books that are in the store and placing them near the front desk. Reducing staff so that we only have three or four employees who all know what is there, and only hiring people who are capable of having conversations with people about those books and telling them that those books are there. Optimistically, that is 50%. But everything is not going to work. What I know works really well is talking to people and never assuming that a book of $20- $100 is out of reach for any particular customer. A first edition of a book is about the most thoughtful and complimentary gift that you can possibly give to someone. You have assumed that they are intellectually capable of appreciating the difficult piece of literature that you have selected. It is a one-of-a-kind object of which no more will ever be made. Fuck NFTs. This won't likely depreciate. I can do this. I can finish turning this bookstore around. I just want the figurative keys right now. I'm sick of holding back. I want to move the Black History section up from the basement, I want to put impulse buys in the front room instead of books on dance, etiquette and heraldry. I want to fix this whole fucking store and I am sick of being blocked on the most obvious fucking things that need to be done. I want to own this building already, and to fix everything wrong with it, and to sell lovely books out of it. _____________ The good Lindsay is now working on Friday and Saturday nights, and she is looking to add Thursdays and Sundays. She has a masters in social work, and doesn't want to work more than 20 hours a week as a social worker, so she is leveraging her awesome Culinary Inst1tute of America degree by doing restaurant work. So, how are we supposed to actually date? When is she free? In practice, once a week on a weekday we watch a movie at her place and then I have to clear out before her ex-husband and roommate gets off of work at 10 pm. Time enough to make dinner and for me to go down on her and then the coach turns into a pumpkin. She doesn't want to take hormonal birth control anymore, so the only way I can fuck her is with a condom which is so not what I want to do. Like, condom sex is not worth my bothering with. I would rather have sex with one woman bareback for the rest of my life than fuck a different woman every week with a condom. Her solution is that she wants to get her tubes tied. I would like an option to have more kids. She doesn't want to have biological children. So I don't think that this is going to work. Lindsay is a very, very good human being. She runs a lot and does yoga and takes care of herself physically. She is very much into her AA program. She has this thyroid issue that has caused hair loss. She puts zero effort into her appearance aside from exercise. She has created a schedule wherein she could be doing enough as a social worker to make a living, but doesn't want the emotional burden of more than 20 hours a week of that and so works restaurant jobs on all of the nights when we could be going on dates and interrupting days when we could be off doing fun things. Lindsay wants this to work. I think? But then she made this schedule. I don't see a way to integrate her into my life for real. I would. She is pretty and accomplished and smart and well-educated and being an atheist Jew from NYC is a huge plus. But not wanting biological kids, and never being available to go out or go on road trips with me, there is just not that much actual inventory of her for me to say "yes" to. She has cute sticking-out ears. She lets me go down on her a lot. Her blowjobs are terrible. She has a lot of insight into culinary history. I can't actually fuck her because of the condom thing. She is a very good human being. If she was available to come out with me and do things more, then I would introduce her to my family and integrate her into my life. Maybe I should tell her that these things are problems? 2:15 a.m. - 2023-09-30 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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