The Beat Booksellers

Selling books has always been considered a quiet, genteel and vaguely intellectual profession. In recent years, though bookstore sales are up, all but the larger shops (which carry everything from phonograph records to cute paper napkins along with reading matter) have been harassed by competition from book clubs, high prices and complaints about inefficiency. Last week brought new evidence on the situation. To promote a forthcoming book--a second-rate soulsearcher on The Way We Live Now--Little, Brown sent out about 3,000 cards inviting opinions from booksellers, reviewers, radio-and newsmen on present-day living conditions. Some of the replies dealt with life in general, but many of the answering bookstore owners and employees took the question personally, volubly commented on their own lives. The answers, mostly gloomy, with interludes of hectic gaiety, seemed to suggest that a great many booksellers are on the verge of a crackup. Samples:

From Washington: "I believe we live high and beyond our means, usually on someone else's money. We are always in debt."

California: "I work eight hours a day managing a bookstore with a boss as nervous as a test pilot going to the moon, put up with demanding customers asking hundreds of asinine questions, and then go home at night to a neurotic husband trying to sell insurance. I've discovered 15 new gray hairs and a birthday is coming up. What else have I left except the consolation of a good book in bed?"

Michigan: "I live like a damned dog. I am supporting my wife, my four children and myself (all in one establishment) on take-home pay of $3,600. This is if I'm lucky. All the rest, if any, goes to the credit managers. Moral--the least you can do at Little, Brown (in addition to shooting four or five credit boys) is send me free books."

Seattle: "You call being in the book business living?"

New York: "Afternoons I work in the morgue. Mornings I pupil-teach in preparation for a teaching license. The morning teachers are far deader than the afternoon corpses. Evenings I study, periodically falling asleep over a book with the cross-eyed Siamese cat asleep at my thigh. Tomorrow I will eat three big meals and play my cello."

Connecticut: "Hacked, hurried, harassed, harried and harnessed, but happy."

New York: "It's a rat race, but we love it--we never had it so good. You can keep the tranquilizers--the magnum of champagne is for me!"

Michigan: "And who has time to think about the way we live now? I got important work to do: for the company, for togetherness with the wife and kiddies around TV, for love once a week (Thursday; ; up and at 'em 7 a.m. for another round, bigger and better. You've gotta be on the ball every minute in this world, buddy. Gotta live hard if you're gonna get anywhere. Read a book? How long's it take? Sorry pal, I gotta run."

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