Tales of a book-monkey

Two middle-aged ladies wandered in to a branch of a well-known booksellers. Helmet-coiffed and enthusiastically made up, they marched straight up to the counter.

Two middle-aged ladies wandered in to a branch of a well-known booksellers. Helmet-coiffed and enthusiastically made up, they marched straight up to the counter.

"We're looking forCaring for the Suicidal."

I looked down at the grubby keyboard. My fingers tapped and there it was: Caring for the Suicidal. It was in print, but we would have to order it.

"How long?" the second lady asked.

"Two weeks."

They looked at each other and then at me. "Too late," they chimed and walked out.

Bookselling was weird. I spent eight long months in that nether world of overstocks and pyramids, lost souls and bipolar customers. I was typical, with my red-brick English degree and my idealistic fantasies about bookselling. I imagined literary conversations with 22-year-old nymphs with Pre-Raphaelite manes. How impressed they'd be when they learnt that I had done the Poetry Workshop module at my university!

"Poetry workshop? Meet me in the store cupboard at 3.15. I knew you were special."

In between torrid assignations in dusty cupboards, the staff would swan about, reading out the paragraphs that changed our lives in select, weepy groups. There would be wine at lunch, and togas all round.

No wine. No togas. The reality was far, far darker.

Only two weeks before, meandering down the highstreet I had noticed a sign in the fateful branch's window: "Bookseller Wanted". I looked at the staff and customers, thinking how nice it might be to wear one of those plastic tags. But did I really want to work in a shop? Perhaps I would just ask for a book instead.

As I got to the front of the queue, the tired-looking man who had been mechanically stuffing books into bags ducked beneath the counter. I was suddenly looking at the most beautiful bookseller in the world. Her walnut tresses dangled over her olive shoulders, and the square of her shop badge rose and fell with each gentle breath beneath her vintage top. Perhaps the myths were true.

"I'm here for the job..." I squeaked. To make matters worse, I got the damn thing.

First thing every morning we sat on the stairs as though attending some twisted nursery for post-grads. This was our morning meeting, a convention designed to quash whatever straws of motivation we might have smuggled through the glass doors. Every day we got the same dull sermons of service from our manager. Behold Janet, the typical kind of boss for this chain. Janet looked like potatoes poured into black clothes and spoke just as engagingly.

No one listened. We all just sat there, huddled like chimps in the rain. However, it was a good time to inspect your fellows.

There were perhaps eight of us at any one time in the shop. Half of those were the likes of Clara (the Pre-Raphaelite) and me, a year out of university and wondering what to do with our lives. The remainder were made up of temps, and lifers: those unfortunate creatures lodged in bookselling well into their thirties.

A young colleague named Luke, taken on around the same time as me, was the first to realise what a dead-end we had landed in. In a bid to get fired, he took to answering the phone with the words: "I suppose you want a book." At last he hatched the perfect escape plan. The look on Janet's face when she found the humour table piled high and exclusively with copies of the Koran was remarkable. Luke left later that afternoon.

For some reason the rest of us stuck it out. Oh, I was difficult. Assigned to the worst section, SF and Fantasy (every day a ton of new loin-cloth nonsense to stack), I preferred to lurk behind the till.

This created difficulties too. They were called customers. Constant enquiries along the lines of "Have you got that book? It's red," begin to chafe, while the store's posh location meant a steady, dreadful stream of yoga bunnies and tweedy growlers to tackle.

The growlers were the worst, barking at us, demanding maps of the Dordogne and biographies of Napoleon.

"What do mean you still haven't got it! It was ordered a bloody age ago!"

They had a point. The customer orders system broke down more reliably than a British defence project, exposing us to strawberry-nosed, port-assisted rage nearly every day.

The truly insane were not infrequent either. The woman who slapped a colleague for suggesting a 28-tape Bulgarian language course might be the kind of thing one has to order, sticks in the memory. "What do you mean?!" she screamed. "Surely it is the commonest thing!" Whack!

She was a one-off; but we had all sorts of regular loonies such as Tommy, the local addict, who stole to order. A big white van sold knocked-off books every Saturday near the station. Tommy stole for them, but only on a Friday; the rest of the week he would quietly sit by the Tintins and read them all.

Come Friday and the peace was shattered. Tommy would be held down, squealing like a piglet as one by one the H Potters and Lonely Planets were removed from his ragged fleece. The next day he'd be back, sitting childlike by the boy detective.

Occasionally the routine was varied by a visit from a best-selling author. One day, Jilly Cooper was due to do a signing, and I was assigned to help her pre-scrawl her mountain of books to cut down on queue time for the public. Ronald, our assistant manager (he wore green cords and could never look you in the eye) rushed out to buy cakes and champers for Jilly and instructed me to stand by her pile of books. My task was to hold them open in front of her as she signed, while Ronald oozed round her with the goodies.

Like some rogue royal, she was all sibilance and politesse. "What do you do?" I should have thought this was pretty obvious, but to her credit she didn't seem to register that people actually worked in shops and when Ronald's back was turned she would force her champagne into my hand. "Have a sip, sweetheart, two even! How about a little cake? Goodness, what a lot of my books you have!"

The booze must have got to me because later that day I finally became the snotty bookseller of myth.

"What's this like?" came the young woman's enquiry. I looked up at her ski-tanned face, the sunglasses resting on West London highlights. I looked down at the lump of chick-lit chiselled off the enormous pile we used to block the entrance. The pastel cover had virtually the same woman on the front, except clutching shopping bags rather than a terrible book.

"Probably rubbish," I declared after a theatrical sigh, only to find Ronald beside me. Five minutes later I was in his office.

He sat opposite, steepling his long hands, radiating patrician authority. The entire bookshop attempted to hate this strange man but couldn't. The general feeling was of reluctant sympathy, the poor creature having no doubt received an apocalyptic buggering at whatever boarding school his arctic mummy had condemned him to. He stared back through his damage and began speaking like the RP Gollum he was.

"Anthony, I've made some notes for you." In the tiny pause between demanding my presence and waiting for me to arrive, he had seemingly compiled a three-page list highlighting my deficiencies. It contained such gems as:

"Booksellers must never assert customer choices are 'probably rubbish'"

"Booksellers should refrain from sighing childishly when asked to replace their badge"

and my favourite:

"Booksellers must not openly read."

A couple of days before "Rubbish-Gate", he had caught me leafing through a copy of Sylvia Plath's diaries. Before I could turn the third page, Ronald was upon me. Incandescence in a cardy, he stormed: "Get on with some fucking work, Anthony, I've got better things for you to be doing than reading in this shop."

In a modern bookshop, literature is of no great importance unless it is neatly stacked, branded with a three-for-two-sticker and sold to some idiot who wants what they saw on the advert. God forbid you read any.

The mega chains encourage a bohemian atmosphere but reader, don't be fooled. The juggernaut treats both the masterpieces on their shelves, and the staff who sell them, with total indifference. Hordes of enthusiastic young workers slip through their fingers, while ziggurats of dross slowly clog their stores, the commercially irrelevant sections like philosophy, poetry and the Classics left to dwindle away.

For a while I took comfort in those around me, the sweet and soulful people who staff the meaningless mall. But then I began to see it in everybody's eye: the wanderlust. Soon, I intuited, these people would absent themselves from the life of the book-monkey and the sticker-bitch.

It was the Christmas party, a meal at a local pub, that finally sealed it for me. Janet, the boss, left after 10 fun-filled minutes. Before going, she instructed us to be quiet when we left in case the local residents recognised us. Ronald went soon after, half a bottle of wine making him dangerously flirtatious.

So there we were, the crew free at last from managerial eyes, waiting for our reward for half a year's slave labour. This turned out to be onion soup with Hula-Hoops on top. Hula-Hoop soup? It couldn't get any cheaper. If there had been more than two bottles of wine things might have got rowdy.

We financed the rest of the evening ourselves out of meagre wages. I could see the writing on the wall. We were all preparing to leave because no matter how good the people are around you, a chain bookshop is a tragedy. It is a place where (at best) lives and dreams are put on hold, but sometimes get trapped forever.

Clara left the next week. In pursuit of a real bohemian dream, she was running away to Paris. Like me, she had been looking for inspiration, for shelter from our uncertain futures doomed to a horribly commercial reality. But a horrible commercial reality is what chain stores exist in and bow to. There is no time for inspiration, no time for dreams, just the endless shovelling of crap at a resistant public. This particular juggernaut takes advantage of its workforce and demeans its reputation as a serious bookshop with an increasingly moronic, centrally dictated stock. I could not believe I had wasted nearly a year of my life in its service.

One day I handed in my notice during lunch and decided to leave that evening. Half an hour before the end of my final shift, I inspected the Classics section one last time. Diminishing though it was, it still contained so many great works, so many gems left shamefully to gather dust at the back of the store. I slipped a Russian I hadn't read into my bag as compensation for lost time. After all, no one would ever notice.

I strolled confidently out. Ronald was the only one to see me go. To my surprise he handed me a leaving card. He had inscribed it with a John Lennon lyric: "Life is what happens while we're making other plans."

I shook his hand, looked into his eyes for the first and last time, and left forever.

All the names in this piece have been changed. Except Jilly Cooper's.