A Book Nerd’s Dream: Stories Toward Opening My Bookstore

This is the beginning of a story that (I hope) will have in it the part about me opening my own bookstore. I hope the story doesn’t end there – as you booksellers know, it’s the ongoing narrative that’s the stuff dreams are made of, not the single moment of opening the doors. I’m a bookseller too, and have been for quite a while, but I haven’t yet made it to that climactic moment of owning my own store. In hopes that it will prove interesting both for booksellers and for those with entrepreneurial ambitions, I’d like to offer my story, unspooling behind me as it unfolds ahead of me, for the Bookshop Blog.

Chapter 2. The Epiphany.

I loved working at Three Lives when I was an undergraduate. Coming into the bookstore from the hectic streets and the stress of classes was like taking a deep breath. The quiet, the smell of books and wood and candles, the green glass lampshades, the colleagues who mothered me and gossiped with me and taught me about contemporary literature (which, despite my English major, I knew nothing about) – it was like heaven. I couldn’t believe I was getting paid for it. And I was learning to be a good bookseller – it was a great shop for handselling, and it was small enough that every employee had their hands on every aspect of the store.

During my senior year, I came back from Christmas break to be told that Jill and Jenny had sold the bookstore – what?!? – to Toby Cox, that guy who had been hanging around for the last couple of months. It turned out to be the best thing that could have happened for the bookstore and for me at that point. Toby was, if possible, an even better boss than Jill and Jenny. He had come from a publisher (Crown), but before that had worked for many years at the Brown University Bookstore in Providence, and brought a lot of experience and love to bear. As he promised, he kept the feel of the store intact, but made some practical internal changes that were all for the best, and was both reasonable and generous with employees and customers – a true book person, and still one of my best mentors.

And yet, as graduation approached, I announced that I would have to leave the bookstore to find a “real job.” I was a BA now, and BA’s worked in offices, or in universities. I wasn’t ready to commit to academia, though I still imagined I’d be a professor someday, so I opted for the English major’s fallback job: editorial assistant in a publishing house. I followed up on some leads, applying to Knopf and some educational publishers. Again it’s strange to ponder what a different life I might have had if I’d gotten hired at Knopf – that might have been my dream job, but I didn’t make the cut.

I ended up working at Bedford St. Martin’s, a college textbook publisher, in the Communications department. It wasn’t trade publishing, but it was publishing – I would have my hands on making books, and a steady if small salary. I had a good feeling about the people there, which turned out to be accurate – one of my office mates became my boyfriend and, much later, my husband.

But that was the only thing I was right about. I was a terrible editorial assistant. I found I didn’t much care about the books we were publishing, and I didn’t like the busywork that was my responsibility. I was unorganized and inefficient. I hated sitting in a cubicle. I hated the office politics and the early mornings. I cried a lot, seemingly unreasonably – there was no real suffering in my job, but it just felt so wrong.

I started working some weekends at the bookstore, for a little extra cash, and despite the six-day week, looked forward to it. At the bookstore I could do things right, and make people happy, and make up for the frustrations of the rest of the week. But I knew I couldn’t do this forever.

So I started applying to graduate school. Cocky because of my 100% acceptance rate as an undergrad, I stuck to the top tier: Literature PhD programs at Stanford, NYU, Columbia. It was time to live up to my potential, I figured; I would read and teach and write brilliant exegesis on Woolf and Bishop. I wrote my essays and got my transcripts sent off and waited.

And I got rejected by every single program (except NYU, my alma mater, which offered my a master’s program with no financial aid). I cried some more, but the reasons were obvious. I hadn’t published anything since graduation; I wasn’t versed in literary theory beyond my freshman seminar; I loved books, but I was faking it as a potential academic.

One evening at my boyfriend’s house, I was crying again over my rejection and the new open-endedness of my plan for my life. That was when that long-suffering man, himself a serious book person (referred to on my blog as the ALP, for Adorably Literate Partner), offered the observation that changed my life.

“It doesn’t seem like you really wanted to be an academic, any more than you want to work in publishing,” he said. “The only job you ever really liked and were good at was working in the bookstore.”

My lightbulb came on like a dimmer – slowly, but steadily. I loved writing and talking about books, but not as a theorist – as a chatterer, a handseller. I loved the experience of being a reader among other readers, not in the rarified world of academia, or the removed and abstract one of publishing. I loved the space of the bookstore, the physical tasks, the making and maintenance of beauty and order and comfort. I was a bookseller.

I can’t remember whether I shared this epiphany with Toby, but somehow, for some reason, he offered me a full-time job at the store. I didn’t hesitate – I walked into my boss’s office at Bedford and gave two weeks notice. My first day back at Three Lives, my mom sent flowers – it was May Day, and there was reason to celebrate.

It took some more conversations to figure out that this was not only what I wanted to do now, it was what I wanted to do for life. A friend working in urban development helped me articulate the importance of bookstores in community life, and my first regional bookseller conference showed me the wider world of bookselling. But that moment in the ALP’s bedroom was the one all of us booksellers have at one point or another: the moment when we realize this isn’t just a retail job, it’s our calling. The rest was history – or at least, it will be.

Posted by: Jessica Stockton Bagnulo

www.writtennerd.blogspot.com

This is the beginning of a story that (I hope) will have in it the part about me opening a bookstore. I hope the story doesn’t end there – as you booksellers know, it’s the ongoing narrative that’s the stuff dreams are made of, not the single moment of opening the doors. I’m a bookseller too, and have been for quite a while, but I haven’t yet made it to that climactic moment of owning my own store. In hopes that it will prove interesting both for booksellers and for those with entrepreneurial ambitions, I’d like to offer my story, unspooling behind me as it unfolds ahead of me, for the Bookshop Blog.

Chapter I. The First Bookstore Job

Not to get all Dickensian or Salingerian on you, but I’ll begin at the beginning of my life – because I wouldn’t want to open a bookstore if I wasn’t the person that I am. I grew up bookish, which isn’t unusual. But I was homeschooled until sixth grade, with a mother for a teacher who believed that we’d learn just as much by reading for pleasure as by sitting down for lessons. I edited the high school literary magazine, wrote poetry, worked on the newspaper, did great in English classes, and everyone seemed to think I’d become a writer or a professor – and I guessed I did too. But I needed to find out somewhere completely different, so I left my California hometown on a scholarship to New York University.

And I almost went home after the first year. It’s a dark, dirty city when you’re far from home. Luckily, I made a few good friends, did okay in class, and got some good jobs – not jobs that paid well, but ones that gave me the safe place I needed. My first gig in a warm little family-run bakery probably saved my life, and I later worked as the night manager of a Dean & Deluca – I never thought that would come in handy for my career, but the diversity of nationalities and languages in that coffee shop taught me a great deal about how to talk to employees and coworkers.

I had a great poetry teacher my junior year – a grad student who understood what I was trying to do in writing and could help me find my way to doing it. She took our class out for an end-of-the-year party at a Mexican place (that served pitchers of Margaritas and never carded), and at some point asked casually if I was looking for a job. I was sick of the night shift in Rockefeller Center and said yes, and she revealed that she was leaving her job at a bookstore to finish her master’s. She gave me the proprietor’s number and told me to get in touch.

And then I totally forgot about it. I didn’t make the call until my teacher called to remind me, and it’s weird to think how nearly I missed out on my life. I went in to the bookstore, Three Lives & Company in the West Village, one afternoon. I later heard it described as a jewel of a bookstore – a tiny spot, but lighted well, with wood shelves and counters I later learned were homemade, and every book looking as though it had been specially placed in its spot, waiting to come under your hand.

The proprietor was a pleasantly brusque woman named Jill, and she took me down to her office and told me that if L.B. (my teacher) said I was okay then the job was mine. The place had always gotten its employees by serendipity, she said, and it always seemed to work out. She told me what shifts I’d be working and sent me on my way. I remember I bought myself a bunch of flowers (which I couldn’t afford) to celebrate on the way home, then pinned them on the wall of my dorm until they dried down to lovely husks – apparently I knew even then that that was a good day.

Much of the store’s history and lore I found out later. It was first opened in 1978 – the year I was born. The name came from Gertrude Stein’s novel Three Lives, and from the three women who founded the store together. The store was run by Jill and her partner, Jenny – the third “life” had left for California long ago. Though a Barnes & Noble was just around the corner on 6^th Avenue, the store never seemed to be in trouble. There were too many regulars, too many folks who came out of their way to go to the shop, too many people who came in just to look and came away with a book or three because of a recommendation, or just because they wanted to own a little piece of that place.

Why they kept me on there, I’ll never know. I was green and dreamy, sometimes forgetting to come in altogether, changing my schedule because of classes, and often making mistakes. But I’m grateful. I ran into Jill and Jenny a few months ago – apparently they’d been keeping up with my doings. “So you want to be a bookseller now, huh?” Jill said. “Who would have thought?” I didn’t say so, but it was partly her fault. Working at Three Lives made me fall in love with the bookselling life, and with New York, and started me on the path toward opening a bookstore.

Jessica Stockton Bagnulo

www.writtennerd.blogspot.com

[editor's note]

Stay tuned to the bookshop blog for the ongoing story. Jessica will be keeping us all updated with her dreams, goals and any progress made or pitfalls encountered. In order to not miss a story you can subscribe by putting your email address in the box on the top right or by clicking on the orange button if you are already using a feed reader.

Chapter 2: The Epiphany