“Where is the American collector who wore a miner’s lamp on his forehead so as to enable him to penetrate the darker cavities of the bookshops he visited?” demands Marius Kociejowski during the course of his eccentric, meandering new memoir, A Factotum in the Book Trade. “Where,” he goes on,
is the man who collected Stefan and Franciszka Themerson’s Gaberbocchus Press titles? . . . Where is the man who collected virtually every edition of The Natural History of Selbourne by Reverend Gilbert White? Where is everybody? Am I deluding myself in thinking collectors are no longer as colorful as they once were?
And what about the bookshops themselves? Where have they all gone? Anyone who enjoys rooting about in secondhand and antiquarian bookshops will have noticed that in the last few decades such emporia have been vanishing at an alarming rate. Several times recently, while walking the streets of New York, I’ve looked forward to visiting some favorite hole-in-the-wall book trove only to discover that it’s morphed into a Starbucks or a Jamba Juice. Kociejowski, a native of Canada who spent most of his working life in London and has recently retired from the trade, assures us that this is happening in England too—“even in supposedly bookish places like Oxford and Cambridge.” The question is: when they have all gone, will life still be worth living?
It’s easy to blame the internet and Amazon, AbeBooks, Alibris, and their like for this new
