“Nevertheless booksellers generally find that it pays them better to have a certain number of books stolen (we used to lose about a dozen a month) than to frighten customers away by demanding a deposit.”

This is, perhaps, an old lesson needing to be re-learned in the digital era?

Either that or burn them.

To your point, Orwell did write several critical essays on the types of literature popular with working- and lower-middle class people in England. See “Boys Weeklies” and “Good Bad Books” as examples. His views on popular literature also informed elements of 1984, particularly the co-option of entertainment by the totalitarian state.

I think that’s a misleading title. I don’t find it to be ill-tempered or rant like. I read it as more of a depressed look at his state of mind post book shop experience. Like he’s look back at what used to be fun but is no longer.

But I would point out that working at the library hasn’t diminished my love for young to middle-aged books in the slightest. I still love shiny, smooth new covers, and I’m even fond of the nondescript academic uni-color binding with which they replace the original covers.

I’m a total book fetishist. I worked in a bookstore for a few years, too, and it only augmented my obsession because of all the free and bargain deals I got there. Not saying Orwell is wrong so much as there may be other experiences out there, and mine is one of them.

He was wrong about putting the milk in last, though.

It did, however, foster my hatred of customers, most of whom seem keen to be vicious, inconsiderate jerks.

I’ve avoided CS ever since.

I can’t be the only one….

“The best thing about buying a book is then you don’t have to read it.”

Maybe it was because I’d had half a dozen crappier jobs before that. If you are going to work in retail, bookstores are the best place. The customers are actually more gracious to you than in any other form of retail because they assume you know more than they do, and they’re right.

I also worked in a newsstand and that was depressing. The customers were aggressively anti-intellectual. People referred to magazines, and I mean crappy wrestling magazines, as “books”. It drove me up the tree. And our biggest sellers were porn.

Porn, wrestling, automobile, sports and fashion magazines. Boring, depressing and stooopid.

I think Orwell’s main beef is really with working retail. Think he would have been happier working at the GAP? Would he have blamed the jeans for his misery?

Retail is just kind of crappy.

I’ve worked in a commercial bindery. A small-scale outfit, but we weren’t sewing signatures by hand. I’ve done nearly every operation in the binding of small lots of books. It was one of the most satisfying jobs I’ve ever had. If only I’d been older and wiser when I had it.

A quote from the owner of said bindery: “You’re not a real bookbinder if you have all ten fingers. No whistling!”

And yes, there’s nothing like the smell of a library or used book store. All that moldering paper and glue.

Fun aspects of bookbinding:

Precision

Shaping the spine with a backing hammer.

Learning to read upside-down and backwards when typesetting for stamping titles on the cases.

Learning to be ambidextrous when your hand becomes too blistered and sore from the backing hammer.

Having the calluses that come from working hard at hand work.

Downside:

Glue is unforgiving of mistakes.

Constantly washing hands to keep them clean so you don’t smudge the end papers.

Buckram is unforgiving of stamping mistakes.

Constant paper cuts.

Perfectbinding glue is molten plastic which sticks to skin.

Of course, that just typifies our culture and political state here in the US of A. Sad eh?

I usually like Orwell, but sometimes he’s just a whiny spoiled intellectual.

Jjasper, Orwell is one of history’s greatest documenters of the conditions and privations of working people; books like DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON and THE ROAD TO WIGAN PIER are as clear-eyed, ferocious and brilliant an exegesis on labor and the working poor as have ever been published.

Becoming a librarian only made me love books more. Hell, I sometimes buy a McSweeney’s title just for the design of it (and only ht design since it’s certainly not for the limp prose inside).

“Burma Days” is a total bummer, but a good antidote for revisionist trogs who think life in the Subcontinent under British rule was just peachy.