The Oxford English Dictionary informs us the term bookseller was used as early as 1527 ("Higden's Polycron. (title), Imprented..at ye expences of John Reynes bokeseller."); and showed up again, unnervingly, in 1615 ("CROOKE Body of Man 420 He dissected a Bookseller, and found his heart more then halfe rotted away.").
But during a week in which "independence" is a national theme, I'll move forward in time to consider the bookselling life of Henry Knox. According to David McCullough's 1776, Knox was Boston-born (1750) and self-educated. He "became a bookseller, eventually opening his own London Book Store on Cornhill Street, offering 'a large and very elegant assortment' of the latest books and magazines from London. In the notices he placed in the Boston Gazette, the name Henry Knox always appeared in larger type than the name of the store."
In addition to England's finest (McCullough: "Though not especially prosperous, the store became 'a great resort for British officers and Tory ladies.'"), the London Book Store's clientele included troublemakers like John Adams and Nathanael Greene.
A bookseller's life is inevitably compromised by his patrons, and though Knox joined the Boston Grenadier Corps, he also fell in love with one of his customers, Lucy Flucker. He married her in spite of the objections of her Loyalist father, a royal secretary of the province.
Knox became a Revolutionary War hero, playing an instrumental role when he conceived and executed the daring relocation of more than 50 mortars and cannons overland from Fort Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain to Boston, an arduous journey of nearly 300 miles.
What a bookseller.
In honoring Knox's memory this week, we can also consider how easy it is to become defined by our definitions.
What is a bookseller?
A "vendor of books" says the OED. Webster's Third Unabridged suggests "one whose business is dealing in books; esp. the proprietor of a bookstore." The American Heritage Dictionary opts for "one that sells books, especially the owner of a bookstore."
But "proprietor" and "vendor" limit the definition immeasurably. For a book to find its way to readers, it often must be handsold again and again; from author to agent to editor/publisher to marketing/sales to wholesale/retail buyers to wholesale/retail sales reps and, finally, to all those mysterious readers. In the broadest definition of the term, who isn't a bookseller among this group?
On the other hand, is the proprietor of a pharmacy that features a 30-foot aisle of hardcover and paperback books a bookseller? Is a bookstore proprietor who doesn't actively handsell a bookseller? Is a frontline bookseller who doesn't own the bookshop not a bookseller? Is a great book buyer a bookseller? An events coordinator?
A bookseller by any other name . . .
During the busy holiday weekend, I worked four days straight on a bookstore sales floor. There were times when I felt like a bookseller and times when I felt like anything but. There were times when I engaged in intense and productive conversations about books, and times when I directed traffic (history books over here, poetry books there, children's books here, travel there, bathroom back there, etc.).
Through it all, however, I knew I was a bookseller.
In my working life as an editor, a writer, a teacher, a consultant, I am also always, somehow, a bookseller.
A colleague and I were debating recently whether frontline booksellers were in a sales or a service job. We compromised by deciding that it was both, to varying degrees, but one point upon which we agreed is summed up nicely in Christopher Morley's The Haunted Bookshop:
"I am not a dealer in merchandise but a specialist in adjusting the book to the human need. Between ourselves, there is no such thing, abstractly, as a 'good' book. A book is 'good' only when it meets some human hunger or refutes some human error. A book that is good for me would very likely be punk for you. My pleasure is to prescribe books for such patients as drop in here and are willing to tell me their symptoms. Some people have let their reading faculties decay so that all I can do is hold a post mortem on them. But most are still open to treatment. There is no one so grateful as the man to whom you have given just the book his soul needed and he never knew it."
A position to which we all aspire, definitions be damned.
Happy Independence Day, booksellers, whoever you are.--Robert Gray (column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now)