“I think of bookstore jobs as my university. The physical trade of books was a hallowed way to become a writer in the pre-MFA era. It was the only work I wanted to do, and the only work I was qualified to do…. With bookstores, you go in and you find the things you weren’t looking for. The clerk is doing that 24/7—my reading was shaped by what was left behind. And you develop a loathing for the false canon—the two books each year that everybody is supposed to read…. You can’t hang onto those sacred quarantines when you see the mad diversity around you.”
—Jonathan Lethem, recalling his time as a bookseller for a Salon article on the vanishing bricks-and-mortar shop clerk