This year's Northern California Independent Booksellers
Association (NCIBA) trade show took place Thursday and Friday of last week. I
was once again able to attend, thanks to a dear friend at Penguin Random House.
I've attempted to explain to a few non-book people why it's so important to me
to go to a trade show for an industry of which I'm no longer a part. The simple
answer is that I want to see the people I used to work with and be in a room
full of books.
The more complex answer has to do with being part of the
community of booksellers. Humans naturally seek out other humans they like to be around to
form tribes, and I knew I'd found mine less than a month into working at a
bookstore. Perhaps people in every industry feel this way, but it seems to me
that booksellers are the most consistently warm, funny, intelligent, articulate
and just generally good-natured people I've ever encountered. I still marvel at
the fact that I used to get paid to sit and talk books with the folks I saw on
Friday. It was my job to listen to them tell me about the books that would be
published in the upcoming season and decide how many to buy for my stores. That
I've been able to stay connected with them (and that they still consider me part of
the gang) means the world to me and proves there are friends who can't really
be separated by time and distance.
I often tell my current boss that bookselling is a noble
profession. I say that (mostly) tongue in cheek, and generally as a response to
his telling me that the beauty industry is based on vanity, hope and fear. But
it's true...and also true that being a bookseller isn't just something that one
does, it's something that one is. A friend from my bookstore days is fond of
saying that she was once, therefore is always, a bookseller. She's right. No
matter what else we end up doing.
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