Occupy Strand
If you have ever sold a book for or to the Strand you know there is nothing new in being taken advantage of by the Bass’s. When we parted company in 1975, over the then deplorable working conditions, poverty wages, the abusive attitude of management to staff and the unionization of the shop, it was […]
The Book Problem
Were the problem book people like us, it would soon go away. It is not our weaknesses, or our sentimentality, or our nostalgia. It’s As If’ we’ve become obsolete and we haven’t. By ‘we,’ I mean We the People of the book: Jews, Christians, Islamic people and a lot of people who believe what they […]
from my forthcoming memoir, Principles of Retail.
Users shouldn’t deal and dealers shouldn’t use Somebody other than me must have said Reading is a finer world within the world. Presumably an unpunished vice, my relationship to literature has at times smacked of self abuse. So much so I’ve been called promiscuously well read. It is a solitary past time, during which time you aren’t […]
