O. Hill, Berkeley, 5/24

I got into the book business in 1981. Before that I had done working class type jobs, warehouse jobs, and I was sick of those, and I was between jobs and they were setting up a Waldenbooks on Market Street. I went in and did day labor, and as I was leaving some of the books stuck to me --

Stuck to you?

Well they just happened to be in my bag as I was walking out. So I got paid by the hour, I got some free books, and I thought “this isn’t so bad.”

Do you remember what books stuck to you?

They were books I wanted to read. I remember a lot of Paul Bowles. They were for my own consumption. I probably sold them years later. …

So that was a two week job. And I thought huh, bookstore work. And I’d always been a book bum as far as looking and browsing and trading a lot at these bookstores. None of the used bookstores would hire me without experience, though, so I just went to the B Dalton downtown in San Francisco and worked there for 7 months. It was a typical awful McDonalds McBook kind of job, but I liked that too because I got books for cost – and that was another I have to admit book thieving experience, they had all these security measures to stop people from stealing books which made everybody want to steal books so they were sort of pouring out the back of the store.

What kind of security system did they have?

All the books were security stripped, and to take books out you’d have to get a slip signed by the assistant manager. And walking out with a bag you’d have to walk through the security gates, all the employees would have to. They knew people were stealing. But the back door was for receiving, and a lot of things escaped that way. A well-placed request to one of the receivers would get you a book that had “fallen off the truck”. I requested a lot of Paul Bowles, I was still collecting Paul Bowles.

How was the job otherwise?

I was pretty much the cashier, and I worked at their dumb little information desk looking at the microfiche – remember microfiche? I enjoyed that part of the job, I thought this could be interesting if I was at an interesting place, and I immediately started applying at City Lights, which was the most interesting bookstore on that side of San Francisco. I was living in the Mission where there were no bookstores. Almost nobody was there, it was way before Adobe. Modern Times might have been there, and there were some Spanish language bookstores.

What about across the bay, did you apply in Berkeley?

I was very anti-Berkeley at that time, I wanted to be a San Franciscan, so it was City Lights or nothing. But somebody at City Lights told me Discovery Books next door might hire me. Turned out it was going out of business and somebody new had bought it, and it became Columbus books. That was my first used bookstore job.

The guy who ran Columbus books was a sleazeball and there were lots of stolen books involved there. I didn’t steal any myself because they didn’t have very good books. It was a great place to work though because nobody really paid attention and it was next door to City Lights and the Trieste and I got to be in North Beach and meet the people from City Lights and all the poets and have coffee with Jack Hirschman and take really long breaks because nobody gave a shit -- so it was kind of perfect.

Did the City Lights people hang out at Columbus?

They used Columbus to sell back used books mostly, though they never seemed to sell us the good ones. But Jack Hirschman would come in and buy all these foreign language books because he was translating a lot, and – it was a good era for North Beach. The Mab was still going, there were all these punk clubs and crazy people at Art Institute, the store would stay open til midnight so nights were fun, the strippers would come in – so I liked the whole thing. And I liked the dirtiness of the used book business, the dusty books and the weird books, the things you had no idea existed.

How did you learn to buy books?

There was a guy who had worked at Green Apple and was an old- what I am now. A book guy. He’s a cab driver and a part time book scout now, I see him from time to time, but he was managing and he had a bunch of people my age that he was teaching the book business, while telling us that it’s totally useless and an awful thing to do with your life, it ruined his life - “but look at this, this is a remainder house book, and this is a real book” – it was like that, he’d teach you and then he’d try to get you to do something else.

Why did he want to discourage you?

Oh he’d say there’s no money in it and I’d never get a nice house and you’re dusty all the time….But I learned a lot from him. The store specialized in postal auctions, which is a great way to learn how to buy – 20 boxes would come down the chute into the basement and we’d dig through them for the good books.

What’s a postal auction?

Books lost in the mail, never picked up – every so often there’d be an auction and you’d bid on lots, which would be 20 boxes of who knows what – it was really fun, it got me into that digging for books habit. It was mostly just ok stuff, fodder for the shelves, but you could find things like people’s personal journals, too – and lots of porn, shipments of porn that for some reason didn’t get picked up. We'd sell that at the bookstore too, the owner was totally unscrupulous about that…

So I found a place on Nob Hill and worked at Columbus for about a year. I finally quit to go back to Santa Cruz to save money, and ended up being a book buyer at Logos, which was a very good place to be a book buyer. Old book folks worked there and they were extremely serious about it. It was a kind of AAA club for Moes – people went back and forth. The owner had worked at Moes in the 70s....

I was one of the only young people at Logos. It was mostly these people who were very serious -- and that’s when it first dawned on me – well except for that one crusty guy at Columbus books, he was one of them too – that there’s a whole culture of these book people. Logos had maybe eight buyers, and they were going to stay there for as long as the store was there. They were all that type – the type I’ve become -- who were just going to buy books until… until there’s no more book business..

At the time did you think you were going to be one of them someday?

Yeah, I sort of aspired to it. They were really smart, and they’d found a way to be in one of those weird corners of America where you’re not corporate where you dress the way you want, you get to be sort of an outsider intellectual – I liked that. I liked them. They were often too quirky to be friends with but they were really interesting people.

What were they like apart from being book experts? What else did they do?

There were a couple of writers that were publishing in small presses, a couple people who were just collectors with houses full of books – there’s always that, the people who have more books in their storage spaces than are in the store – this one guy Steve Lacy moved to New Orleans to start his own bookstore and he just packed up his collection and that was the bookstore. It’s probably under water now. But he did it, he had that store for years. So its – I don’t know, I guess it’s a dying culture, but there are still people like that, whose whole life is the collecting of books. He didn’t do any writing or anything but he was extremely well read and had that collector’s mentality.

What was it like for you being a novice at Logos?

It was tough. You had to show your buys to a superior, you had to initial every book and write C or T, cash or trade. The owner himself was an okay buyer but he had some extremely smart buyers working for him, like the people at Moes who were insane about it, like Dan -- there were three Dan types there. It was really intimidating and I would sweat it out sometimes; they would have a stack of books and ask – why did you buy this? And also, since you dated and initialed everything, months later somebody could pull out a book and say why did you buy this and you’d have no memory of it…and people were very competitive about it. I was prepared for Moes when I got there.

What kind of stuff did people bring in?

Well, it was Santa Cruz, so you’d get a lot of Buddhist books, alternative health books – and you’d get these funny buys, old hippies coming down out of the hills with a pickup truck full – there were lots of pickup truck buys. They'd bring in a lot of marijuana books, Ken Kesey, lots of the obvious kind of stuff that kind of person would sell – but that was very popular in Santa Cruz.

Did Logos sell new books?

They had a small new book section, almost no small press. I kept trying to get them to take more small press stuff. I became the poetry guy there -- wherever I go I’m the poetry guy because nobody else gives a shit, and I always advocate for small presses.
But mostly it was used – and records. Back in the day I got to buy vinyl. There was something sexy about buying vinyl, you’d have to hold it up to the light to see if it was warped and check it very carefully – I don’t know, I liked that. I learned a lot about jazz because the guy who did the record section was a jazz fanatic. I got to be -- for a short time I was one of those jazz guys who’d say “you know so and so played bass on that session, and this is an outtake --” just because I listened to it 8 hours a day....

I quit Logos to go travel, and after I came back I moved to Berkeley. I wanted to work at Moes but they weren’t hiring so I got a job at Shakespeares, which was a nut house- it’s always been a nut house, the craziest weirdest cast-off intellectuals in town worked there –

Why crazier than anywhere else?

Well when Bill Cartwright ran it he was an old Berkeley nut intellectual himself, and Jean Hechtman worked there, who’s really well known as a character in Berkeley -- you know the type of person at the book counter who we can’t be anymore: he’d insult people if he didn’t like them or if they used bad grammar he’d correct them…people would say “where’s Homer” and he’d say “Good God man it’s in the classics section what do you think? Where else would we put it? Find it! It’s a small store!”

There were good buyers there but they could be extremely quirky, and Bill had friends you had to buy from because they were friends – he had some weird ideas about books he wouldn’t buy…he liked Edith Wharton so you could never turn down a book by Edith Wharton, so there were boxes of books by Edith Wharton…

Did he have his own book scouts?

He did, there were book scouts that sold only to him, that loved him…they’ve since disappeared and died but there was just a whole circus of them. There were some that really liked Bill. It was almost like they were on salary. They’d bring in their whole load and be sure of getting their 200 dollars a week, he knew it and they knew it and he had it worked out so that sometimes those 200 dollar buys would be worth 800 dollars but the scouts didn’t care because the next week he’d take trash and pay the same…And they were a colorful bunch, they lived in their trucks…I think there were lots of them down outside of Santa Cruz – Campbell, places like that. There’s still a couple that come from Ukiah, Yreka, you know, drive up and down this part of the state and sell once a week – there were tons of them when I worked at Shakespeare, they’d come in every day, ask for Bill.

Did you buy from the scouts too?

No, usually the deal was, he’d do that buy and I’d be standing next to him taking care of the civilians. Those buys would be very much like Moes buys, and often those people would have hit Moes first – though some people actually had a loyalty to Shakespeare, they’d hit it first because they liked it. Moes had that reputation for being rude so they’d come in and say “I’d never sell to Moes those guys are assholes.”

Even though you had guys yelling at customers!

Yeah, we had our own assholes! But I understood it at that time. Shakespeare had a hominess about it. It was an old fashioned bookstore. You had time to talk more, people liked that...And it was the people who worked there -- Paul Young, he worked there for years and years, a guy named Cliff who’s still around -- the kind of people who never leave Berkeley. After Cartright died it was a new bunch. But it seems like it’s still kind of the same thing -- people who were a little too goofy for Moes – you have to be pretty goofy! And people who don’t want to be as rigid…Moes is considered rigid, which is kind of funny compared to what most people do for a living.

Well it’s more hierarchical…but you said you wanted to work at Moes; did you have your eye on Moes the whole time?

Yeah, because I found out they paid really well. And Cartright – he had all these little tricks, he was not very honest. He would hire you – everybody went through this – he would hire you at say 6 dollars an hour, which I think was a good wage in 1985, and you’d get your first check and it would be for 5 dollars an hour. And you’d argue, but nothing was written down, so he’d say “I would never pay 6 dollars an hour.” I remember being really pissed off at that and mentioning it to a fellow employee and he said “oh yeah he does that to everybody.” It was sort of his way of getting you under his thumb. So I started out angry at him. And then he had this deal where there was no health insurance, no benefits at all, but your December check you’d get an extra month’s pay, that was the one perk. And I guess I was there about 6 months waiting for that December check, and that year he decided not to do that any more and we all got a bottle of wine, which I wanted to break over his head. So then -- I'd already been schmoozing Moe whenever I got the chance, but after that I really stepped it up.. Every lunch hour I’d go over, tell him how much I loved the store, how much I wanted to work there. I think he thought I was kind of a character, so he liked me – it was the poet thing, I got lots of poet jokes. I was good at putting up with it, so I guess he thought I’d be a good Moes guy.

So that’s how he tested his potential employees!

Yeah, Moe was always hiring people like that -- it’s how you got hired. You were really serious about books, and he got to know you or at least remember you a little, and it looked like you were going to be around the store anyway --

Might as well be shelving!

It was kind of like that! It took me around 6 months – I started in summer of ’86 – before I got hired. Those were the days when there were waiting lists to work in the bookstore. Everybody wanted to work at a bookstore. People with PhDs. Remember that? It was a great job back then. You got a 4 day week, you got your books for cost, there was health insurance, 2 weeks vacation – anyway, once it got serious they actually scouted me. John Wong and Robert would come over to Shakespeare and watch me work, sort of hover around, check out my buys. It was like “Let’s go see if he’s good enough to be the new guy!”