Good Times Bookshop - Antiquarian Books

In fact, most old books are worthless, suitable only for recycling. But a lot of people can't bear to throw books away. This is where Mr. Mart assumes a priestly role. "I give absolution," he said. "I tell people it's O.K. to toss them in the dumpster."

The most precious commodity in a small bookstore is shelf space. It's like parking in New York: you have to be ruthless and quick to find a spot for each new arrival. If a customer takes down a book, you have to sneak another one in at once. With luck the customer, stuck with a book in his hand and nowhere to put it, will be embarrassed into a purchase.

The other great challenge is classification. Librarians have their Dewey Decimal System, but booksellers have only their intuition. A bookstore is really a physical model of the inside of the bookseller's head, which means that nothing is or should be obvious. A book about sailing around the world may go in the travel section, or in biography, or under sport or even in philosophy, if the author is inclined to speculate about the meaning of life while he sails the great oceans. Only the bookseller knows for sure.

Browsing is a voyage of discovery. In a very small space you can find such arcane volumes as The Encyclopedia of Bad Taste, some nostalgic Blue Guides to France from 1950's that make no references to Euro Disney or McDonald's, an Egyptian grammar, a handy guide to running your own casino, an edition of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" illustrated with scenes from the 1927 silent movie and an improbable multivolume collection of sermons by the 18th century British humorist Laurence Sterne.

What separates the used bookstore from the modern, giant, antiseptic new bookstore is serendipity. The stock comes from the almost infinite ocean of titles published from 1455 until yesterday. It's like Plato's cave in reverse: the deeper you go in, the more you learn.

After a few hours reshelving books in some semblance of alphabetical order and rearranging the literature and criticism section according to my own mental geography, I felt as if I had never done anything else. The body remembers long after the mind forgets. The dust tingled in my sinuses, my feet ached and my back ached, just like in the old days.

I was also reminded that bookselling is the best possible training in humility. There's nothing like being surrounded by thousands of books that one has not read, and trying to answer impossible questions from customers on every subject under the sun, from fly fishing to physics, to reveal the full extent of one's own ignorance. At the end of the day, I felt both tired and stupid. It was like being young again.

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