O. Hill
part 2, 6/06

So we left off last time when you got the job at Moe's....

Well when I first got to Moe’s I was a little intimidated. Andrew Schelling was running the poetry section, and he was incredibly erudite; he’s teaching Sanskrit in Boulder now. Joe was a lecturer at the University… That’s the kind of person that was working there. I had to learn more than I thought I’d have to learn to have a bookstore job. I’d been at Logos, and Logos was good but it wasn’t as serious – they were good book bums. Moe’s buyers were very studied about it, very scholarly.

Did you start buying right away?

Yeah, it was opposite of Logos, in spite of all that seriousness -- no training period at all. I remember my first week, I worked two night shifts with Gene so he could see if I could work the register and my third day was a day shift with Matt, and he went off to do something, and I said, "But what if I have a buy?" And he said, "You can do it," so I was alone at the counter -- Moe was on the second floor -- and of course somebody came in with a buy that was over my head. I didn’t know if the store needed these books, and I called up to Moe and he just said “Ah just do the best you can!” So that was learning to buy. I’m sure after I bought them I got nasty notes all over the place, why the hell’d you buy this and that…that was the Moe’s way. And I didn’t know the store that well, then. I browsed the sections I liked, but I didn’t know –

Math, engineering…

Yeah, or even the social theory -- Moes prides itself on being really good with that, but the other stores I worked at didn’t even know what to do with it and I hadn’t seen that much. Didn’t matter. Moe’s was making such a profit at that time, mid to late 80s, there was so much coming and going you could make a few mistakes, they’d just get absorbed. Which made it fun. You’d make these big offers, slap the money down…

So Moes must have had more big time book scouts than Shakespeare.

Oh yeah, there was an army of them.

And did they all have their favorite buyer?

Like now only there were so many more. I immediately got a fan club, that would happen really fast. There was this kid named Lance, really a sharp kid, I got him pretty early and kept him for about ten years, until he moved to Prague…there were three or 4 people who liked me because they brought poetry, three guys from Sacramento who would bring their signed small press books that wouldn’t sell in Sacramento -- I miss those characters, there just aren’t as many around. It just isn’t as profitable.

So how was it different, working there after Shakespeare?

Shakespeare was fun, you felt like a punk or something, but Moe’s -- it was a way of life. We’re more humble now, but there was always this feeling of we’re it. We’re the top of the heap, we’re the smartest bookbuyers and booksellers there are, and we’re just in another world. And we kind of were. We had this rarefied kind of staff, where everybody in their own field could have been doing something else.

What brought these people to Moe’s?

That’s an interesting question….It’s that rogue intellectual thing we've talked about. It's all we can do: we’re smart, we know about books and where the hell do you go with that? We all had these fields of expertise, but either we couldn’t or we didn’t want to make a living off them. Moe looked for people like that, he found people like that. And Moes became the anchor so that we could keep on being like that.

What was it like working with so many experts? Were there arguments? Was it very competitive?

Oh, it was great. People would get into fights over highbrow bookbuying theory, it was so serious -- “We can sell this author’s first book but not his other books, so the other books should only be represented on the shelf with one copy,” “no, no, I’ve thrown that book out, we shouldn’t have ANY of those books on the shelf,” and it would go on and on, “Well I’VE sold two copies of that book in one day!” This still goes on. And no records are kept, so it’s all in our brains, and we all think we know what sells so there are these great arguments that are just based on anecdotes – just my memory versus your memory, no data.

So people have whole philosophies of buying?

Oh yeah, always. Everybody has a different style or philosophy, and they often clash. Some people are very picky and they look up every book and check the shelf on every book, others will buy a stack of books and just eyeball it, and there are always fights with notes in the bathroom – that’s the way we communicate at Moe’s – it still goes on. I like that. It’s sad that it may be less important to the consumer now. It always seemed to make a good bookstore, before.

Now it might just be for you. Satisfying your need to be experts.

It feels that way, yeah. Because now it’s the Internet that tells you what sells. It doesn’t matter what we experts say the book is worth, the market says different.

So what about Moe, did he buy books? Was he an expert?

He’d buy, but by the time I got there he was more the buyer guest star – a few old-timers would ask for him but not many, and he’d just get the feel of a buy – he’d say “get the gestalt,” which meant eyeing the open box for a second, pulling out one or two things he knew we needed and then walking away saying “finish this up.” Or he’d do a big pocket book buy, he’d have a pile of yeses and a pile of no’s and he’d say “add this up for me” and walk away.

Was he good?

Not by the time I got there. Maybe early on. I’m sure he must have done all the buying at some point, but by the time I got there he was much more interested just in running the business and being a star, the buying he’d leave to other people. But he figured out the system, so he must have known the books at some point. He was a really good businessman and he figured out – when he started out, all these other used bookstores were paying a quarter for a book and then marking them up ridiculously for the shelves, but who’s going to bother to sell their books if they’re only going to get a quarter? I think he saw that if you paid a dollar for them you’d get all the books, and you’d still make a lot of money. He figured that out. And then he figured out this trade thing: I won’t have to put out any capital, I’ll get great books, and people will come back and spend their trade slips and spend money on top of it almost every time…or else they’ll lose the trade slip and never redeem it…!


Was that a new idea then? Did he invent the trade slip?

Well, old time book dealers might have done a little bit of trade but he’s the one that really pushed it, and he gave what seemed like ridiculous amounts in trade, 50% of retail for trade. No one did that.

How did he figure out that would pay off?

It must have seemed like an incredible gamble 30 years ago, I mean theoretically someone could have stocked up these trade slips, back when Moe’s was a small store, and just come back and gutted the store. But they didn’t seem to do it, and it built a big following. That Moes trade slip is such a part of living in Berkeley. Having one in your wallet.