"Heaven!" the man announced to me, blissfully gazing around him at the books, piled row on row to form a kind of sky. He is certain that to be surrounded by books and work in a bookstore is as dreamy as sitting on your own personal cloud. Well, yes and no. After roughly three years as a bookseller, I can safely say that the heaven of bookselling has its share of little demons. In a 1936 essay called "Bookshop Memories," George Orwell complains about the customer who "doesn't remember the title or author's name or what the book was about but she does remember that it had a red cover." The fact that I could relate to that so well in 1999, (let's see... 63 years later) is amusing but also worries me a little.

Orwell was struck by "the rarity of really bookish people," explaining that "our shop had an exceptionally interesting stock, yet I doubt whether ten percent of our customers knew a good book from a bad one." Indeed, it's difficult to help those people who've "read everything by Tom Clancy" and want another author "just like him." It strikes me as admitting, more or less, that you want to read the same book over and over rather than risk something new. I sometimes tried to get some customers to take a step up. You can't hand them Ulysses but you can try to find them something in between. I once felt satisfied to convince a teenager to skip from John Grisham to Arthur Conan Doyle.

I've often been frustrated at directing people to Danielle Steele when they could be setting their sights higher. Orwell mentions that authors like Hemingway are not the big sellers, but that many go home with "Ethel M. Dell." I've never heard of Dell, which suggests that if there is any hope we'll be rid of Steele one day, it's only when she's been replaced. Some authors are destined to write forever (even after death) when their names become registered trademarks, like the Disney name. What's extremely difficult is to be asked to recommend something when the author's books are all the same to you. Orwell is right to point out the distasteful fact that sometimes "a bookseller has to tell lies about books."

The aversion people have to short stories is somewhat understandable, as it's a difficult form, and often isn't done very well. From his era, Orwell explains how many people avoid them, but blames it on a lazy desire to spend energy on one concept only, wanting to luxuriate in it for a while. I didn't make a habit of asking for their reasons, but have had people tell me that they "don't read short stories" or that they want something they "can sink their teeth into." This could help explain the general lack of interest in poetry as well.

Orwell also states that "Dickens is one of those authors whom people are 'always meaning to' read, and, like the Bible, he is widely known at second hand." One of the saddest experiences I've had as a bookseller came when I helped a woman who wanted Great Expectations. She didn't, however, want the book by Dickens but insisted on taking the novel based on the screenplay for a new film. We sold 5 a month of the Dickens book before the release of that film, and 60 a month for a while afterwards.

Another incident has little to do with books, and begins with a man calling me at the store, asking me to help him save his marriage. He'd kept a book that had been given to him by an old sweetheart, and had torn it out of his wife's hands to prevent her seeing an inscription. Now he needed to buy another copy of the exact same edition to hand to his wife to cover it up. We had one copy of the book and I arranged to put it on hold without demanding cash or asking how he was going to explain tearing the original copy out of her hands. He explained she was "a very suspicious person."

Those who study language patterns should spend time in bookstores, not for the books necessarily but for the speech patterns of customers. A certain percentage of people avoid complete sentences like the plague, little realizing that any time saved is often lost in the confusion that follows. People walking up and saying "Schlink" barely get the point across. It's tempting to blurt something out and pretend it's a word association game. I'm reminded of a businessman that I saw approach an employee and say "Business books?" When she didn't quite hear, he began flapping the arms of his suit like an alarmed penguin, saying "Business books! Business books!" On the other end of the scale, some people tell you a story to ask you a question, beginning by telling you that they were in the store last Tuesday afternoon, about three.

Orwell mentions the "vague-minded" customer, and I think of the people who ask that I practically take them by the hand to the book they want. A woman once insisted that I stand there, after leading her to the author's books, while she fumbled through her purse looking for a piece of paper with the name of the specific title she wanted. It looked like nine people had worked on her hair that morning. After long minutes she pulled a tremendous wad of cash out of her pocket and said "Oh, that's not it." I've been asked why our fiction and non-fiction isn't together, and why you have to go "all the way down to the first floor to pay," as though the customer planned to pay on the third floor and then exit through a window. Anybody in retail is paid too little to be patient with whatever vague or spiteful person walks in off the street. Forget the year of military service some countries make you do, everyone should be forced to work in retail.

This is not to suggest that there aren't kind people, but as much as they're appreciated, memories of considerate people wash away quickly. There is no heavier ink than bitterness. Months and sometimes years later, in my free time, I'm still capable of anger, but this has more to do with retail then books. Orwell doesn't actually mention the hostility of customers, but I believe this is partly because he worked in a local, independent bookshop rather than a larger chain where I found that people were sometimes offended at any lack of convenience. It was more or less expected that we'd have any title, or could get it in "a couple of days." When my store opened it was one of the first large stores in downtown Toronto. I became so used to the anger that was ignited as soon as I said our 2-6 week estimate for a special order (we hadn't changed how fast the publishers would ship a book) that I almost felt we were educating the whole city one outburst at a time.

At large-format bookstores we invite people to browse and sit. The rules can be bent so that if you want to abuse the system you can come every day and stay for hours on end. I've found bookmarks in some books. At my store, we had a variety of characters. The man I call Tom Clancy (because he looks like the author), eventually took to tipping a garbage can over so that he has something elevated for his feet. A woman once verbally blasted a co-worker of mine because one of her favourite authors ended up split between two bookcases. While I was at the special orders desk one quiet morning, a man came along a scooped up my paperwork on the orders and then gave the papers all back to me regularly, one at a time, while asking me questions like "Do you think I'm crazy?" Orwell explains "In a town like London there are always plenty of not quite certifiable lunatics walking the streets, and they tend to gravitate towards bookshops, because a bookshop is one of the few places where you can hang about for a long time without spending any money. In the end, one gets to know these people almost at a glance." The difference then, is that we now invite them to do this.

Orwell explains his frustration with the various sidelines his bookstore had, and I often wish our large-format store concentrated on being a good bookstore and didn't bother with magazines, audio cassettes, compact discs and cards. Nothing makes me look more incompetent than to be caught by a customer in the multimedia section. People fail to realise that we have sections, and that one person isn't familiar with a forty thousand square foot store. Sometimes the greater your diversity, the weaker you are at each of those things. When Maya Angelou visited our store, asking a cashier "Do you have the works of Maya Angelou?" the cashier said "Who's she?"

We don't suffer (as Orwell did) from keeping the store cold to prevent the display windows from fogging up. We do, however, have the air-conditioning woman, who has cornered at least seven or eight staff to complain about how cold it is (we don't agree), and cuts her own hair in the store. Orwell mentions that a bluebottle loves to crawl up onto a book and die, and while I can't relate to that, I have left the store dizzy from paint fumes hanging around in a bad air-circulation system.

I don't agree with Orwell when he notes that working in a bookstore deprived him of his desire to buy books. I bought a lot even though I could afford few. It should also be said that some customers were a pleasant exception to the rules and actually recognized that I'm a person, and that the bookstore has also provided me with some close friends. It's true that at our Christmas party, we were promised a meal that never arrived. In contrast, it was rumoured that our head office got a Christmas party where they gave away trips. This kind of thing represents another significant difference. Orwell undoubtedly worked alongside the owner, especially if the novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying is any indication, but I rarely met head office people, though I did read about some of them receiving bonuses greater than my yearly salary. I doubt the owner of Orwell's bookshop did so well.

This is ultimately the major difference: that now there are book empires in a capitalist, consumer world gone mad. Knowledge itself is seen as a commodity by the owners of modern "empire" book chains and disturbingly, people who arrived to research Italian immigration were sometimes astonished to be reminded that libraries exist. A large-format chain is also selling a lifestyle (come in and sit and hear classical music and read a book) and lifestyle is an essential ingredient in the capitalist dream. I could never imagine what head office people did to deserve real salaries that we didn't. We were the faces that represented the company in public, and we're the ones forced to read the titles of the erotic books to that creepy old blind man whenever he arrived. Overall, my friends and I may not have come out the book business a bunch of misanthropes after all. And what a tremendous relief, with no discount at the larger stores, to have every reason to shop at independent stores.