Here is my summer vacation,
in images from my uncle Martin's 1950s scrapbook,
found on my trip to my grandmother's house in Globe, Arizona.

Back in Berkeley after a summer as an itinerant book pro, I walk up to the Ave. I've heard that Cody's Books on Telegraph has been turned into a Halloween supply store in my absence and I have to see for myself. It's true. There's even a giant inflatable pumpkin out front.




Luckily, the book trade is still thriving on the sidewalk just outside. I see the 25c book man hard at work taping up pocketbooks (he rescues them from the bins behind Halfassed Books, I'm told, where they rip the covers off rejects so no one can enjoy them for free) and browsers gather around in the late afternoon sun.


I scan the science fiction section -- three vintage Philip K Dick paperbacks, all in a row! There's a nicely taped-up edition of Emily Dickinson and a Henry Miller nearby and I grab those too. I'm so excited by my good luck I accidentally pay double. I take some photos and notice that I've captured an old book thief (not pictured.) It's good to be home.

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.

Read 2nd time (collection DSB)

A tour. I stand between Dwight Way and Haste Street on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. In front of me is the stately Moe’s, 4 floors of quality used books (plus some new and remainders), heavy on the academic titles. Top of the trade. To the right on the corner of Haste is the best and oldest new bookstore in town, Cody’s. How could Moe’s exist without Cody’s? Books have to be new before they can be used. Cody’s closes its doors July 10, so we will soon find out.

Up Haste from Cody’s, just below People’s Park, is the former site of my family’s bookstore, Up Haste, in what is now the banquet room of Mario’s La Fiesta Mexican Restaurant. Down Haste, at Shattuck, was Pellucidar (used books and remainders) which later begat Pendragon and Pegasus, where I started my first bookstore job in 1988.



In front of Cody’s, on weekends, the 25 cent pocket books man spreads his wares. Currently he features some of the former stock of Book Zoo, see below, as well as books salvaged from the dumpster behind Half Price Books on Shattuck and from the Friends of the Berkeley Public Library Free cart (the Free cart is one more block up and to the left, down Channing Way. Cross the street to the mall entrance and follow the signs, it’s closed Sundays and Mondays. Revolution Books, the Maoist bookstore that used to be our neighbor at Up Haste, is in the mall too.) Sometimes there are other book purveyors on the sidewalk between Cody’s and Moe’s, with dollar books, probably turned away from the Moe’s buying counter, propped up against the wall of Cody’s magazine section.

Looking south from Moe’s, across the street on the corner of Dwight, is Shakespeare & Co: used bookstore, smaller, darker, messier, a cut below. Long history there: Moe was one of the original partners. Round the corner to the right down Dwight way is another used bookstore, Cartesian Books, on the former site of the Moe’s art annex (More Moe’s, now on the 4th floor. Sells the pricey antiquarian stuff). Next to Cartesian in the 80s was a foreign language bookstore. Next to Moe’s, for more than 30 years, was Shambhala, a new bookstore specializing in spirituality and eastern philosophy. It went out of business at the end of 2003. Across Telegraph from Moe’s is Café Mediterranean, which has seen better days, but is still a place to spot the odd poet (usually Julia Vinograd) or Moe’s old-timer -- maybe one of those diehard 3rd floor browsers, resting from his labors across the street. Browsing is hard work.

A block south on Telegraph, when I was in high school, a chain store, Crown Books, made a brief appearance; on the other side of Telegraph was the original hole-in-the wall Half Price Books outlet (another chain, out of Texas.) One more block south on the Ave is the funny little mall that's home to Fondue Fred and until recently Book Zoo, my favorite hopeless case used bookstore (more on that later). Chris K, one-time Moe’s shelver, Flea Market bookseller and book scout, also had a storefront in that mall for a year or so in the late 90s, more on him, too.

These are only a few of the local stations that books and their agents pass through. To study their complicated itineraries you have to travel way beyond Telegraph Ave, but it’s useful to have a starting place and this is mine: six blocks from where I grew up, south of the university, east of San Francisco, west of People’s Park.

Andrew, San Francisco, 5/25


Are you a book hoarder?

Yes, I hoard heavily. I like photography books, art books, books on New Mexico… I also store books at home that I don’t want to sell too quickly or cheaply. I keep a sort of reserve supply in my apartment. If the store burned down I could reopen in a new location with a full supply.

Your apartment must look a lot like your store, then!

It’s a total mess. It’s really sad. I take people over there and – women won’t talk to me afterwards. There’s no sofa. The bed is consumed with books. I’m living in a coffin – not quite, but I should build a coffin. Then the books wouldn’t nudge into me. I need more space. I like a little mess, sure, but I’d like some property where I could shove everything and display it…a farm, or a warehouse somewhere. I looked at some property in Montana, but it’s a hard place to run a bookstore…

You could get rid of some of the books, or bring them to the store -

I could, I should, but I love books, I love some of them for their – I guess I don’t realize my own mortality. I want to hang onto them. I’m a greedy person, a miser. I don’t know, if I meet the right people I love to get them the right books, but – books are precious. Some of them you don’t see every day. Might as well hang on to those. Any book that could bring me pleasure I like keeping by. I don’t have to sell them all – I sell a lot of books! I don’t know. I need to sell more. I need to sell online. I’m lazy. I’m really lazy. I’m a lazy person. My house is a mess. It’s laziness. Am I a brilliant mind? No, I don’t think so. I’m no Einstein. I’m just – very lazy! Help me out here, I’m not telling you what you need to know.

[lots more from this interview coming soon!]

OAKLAND FREE LIBRARY

Found this on the Free cart today. What a prize. A 1907 book on California Wildflowers, printed in San Francisco, bookplated, stamped and discarded from the Oakland Free Library. Sold once for 2 cents, once for 50 cents. Now entering my collection.

Perforated ownership marks, deterrents to thieves, grace the illustrations. OAKLAND FREE LIBRARY toothwort. OAKLAND FREE LIBRARY forget- me-not. Inside the book the date of acquisition is stamped in purple ink: Feb. 1908.



I looked up the history of the Oakland Free Library. It was founded in 1878, California's second public library (Eureka had the first). The first librarian, Ina Donna Coolbrith, was also California's first poet laureate. Browsing the Wild Flowers book what should I find but an Ina Coolbrith poem: O Land of the West! I know/ How the field-flowers bud and blow...

Interview with Pam, Berkeley, 6/18

Do you remember Up Haste?

Not every well. I vaguely remember the space -- the alley it was in, around the corner from People’s Park, and the kids room, and sitting on the floor reading. I remember there was grownup stuff going on next door that I didn’t bother about. I remember getting snacks at the little food store a block up Telegraph. I remember stuff nearby, Hedge --

What was Hedge?

That was the Free school Shelley and I went to when we first came to Berkeley. It was just a block down Haste Street…Oh, and I remember the day there was a naked man on the roof of a car in People’s Park. And I remember seeing the Berkeley Barb for sale and wondering if it was a dirty newspaper. That’s about all I remember from the Avenue. I wasn’t very old.

Do you remember Moes?

I remember going downstairs to the used record room. I don’t think they had kid’s books. I didn’t go in there by myself, even when I was older. It was intimidating, there always seemed to be a horde of men behind the counter arguing. But I don’t remember much.

You had a busy reading life.

Yes, and a busy playing life. Playing, reading, stuff.

What do you remember most vividly?

From that era? Books, playing with Shelley, my parents arguing about politics, kittens….

Kittens?

The wild kittens at our grandparents’ house in Orinda. We would try to tame them. I would sit still for hours trying to make them trust me. I really loved kittens. I once ripped a whole bunch of kitten pictures out of a library book. I felt horrible doing it, but I couldn’t help it. I remember this sick feeling in my stomach as I went through the book ripping out pages, but I just had to have these pictures! I also stole one of my favorite kid’s books from the school library. That’s not a kitten story, that’s just another example of my shady past in libraries. I also ripped the corners off pages of library books while I was reading them and chewed them like gum.

Do you still do that? Did you do that when you worked at the rare book library?

Of course not! Although I’ve often wondered what it would be like to chew 17th century paper. It was very good paper, you know. They made it from rags. I’d be chewing 17th century underwear.

Tell me about Little Funny People by Pam.

That was my first book. The original is in a tiny spiral notebook with illustrations in colored pencil. The first couple pages of the text are in my handwriting, then my mom transcribed the rest because the story was getting away from me – I was telling it on the spot, and I couldn’t write well enough to keep up. It was a birthday present for my little brother. I wrote it in 1971, when I was six.

Then, because Up Haste was opening a children’s section, my mom and Uncle Smed decided to print up some copies to sell in the store. My mom traced all the original drawings in black marker, and typed up the text and we printed a bunch of copies on our little printing press and collated them. I hand colored the cover with a yellow marker, and I think I colored the illustrations too, on a few of the copies, but those are long gone.

How many copies sold?

I don’t know. My mom doesn’t remember. I know we sold some. I think they were priced at 50 cents. We still have a whole box of uncollated pages, so they couldn’t have really been flying out the door. I was proud, though. I had published my first book and I was only six!

There was another Jackson Children publication distributed by Up Haste, wasn’t there?

Oh yeah, the Monster Coloring Book. It had line drawings of monsters and dragons by me and Shelley and Anthony. You know the great story about that is that much later – we must have been in high school – we stopped in at Shakespeares and they had a stack of Monster Coloring Books on their sale table! They must have bought some from us back in the day. Probably found them in some dark corner somewhere and dusted them off – so that was my first book to get remaindered!

Did you keep writing after Little Funny People?

Oh I wrote tons of stories. But I never had a publisher again, or a distributor, since Up Haste closed. I usually gave them to my parents for Christmas.

Were you sad when Up Haste closed?

I don’t remember being sad. A lot of the books ended up at our house, so it wasn’t a great loss for me, at least I don’t remember it that way -- I don’t think I ever had a clear idea of where our house ended and the bookstore began anyway…or the library, for that matter.You could read any place, and there were books everywhere, you could take them home, bring them back…I did think it was something very special to own a book, though, to have it be my very own.

Did you steal books?

No. Well only that one time at the school library. But I did covet books often, and the great thing about the public library was that every year they would have a giant book sale, and often we could find our favorite books, discarded from the library. Probably with chewed corners, too, that’s probably why they threw them out! So at these sales we could buy them for 25 cents or 50 cents. We didn’t get enough allowance to buy books for ourselves much – I remember ordering one once from Cody’s, that was a big deal – but the library sales meant we could get our hands on these books that we coveted. We would go to the Berkeley Public Library sale in June, and the Oakland Public Library sale…Sometimes afterwards I would take the Mylar jacket off the book and try to make it look like it wasn’t a library discard, but you couldn’t always do that. The library would sometimes cut the cover into pieces and glue it to the book, or some awful thing – glue the Mylar to the book cover…ugh. Ruined. And of course they’d have the pocket glued in to hold the card…

Did you chew on the corners of books you owned?

No, I never did. I feel bad about that. It shows I didn’t really respect library books. I mean I really liked chewing on pages, it’s true, but if it had been an uncontrollable urge I’d have done it to my own books, too. So clearly it was just disrespect. Maybe it was that I thought they were already kind of ruined. Or maybe I just wasn’t looking ahead to when I’d buy this copy at the library sale and all the corners of the pages would be chewed off and I’d be really pissed! Damn! Who did that?!

Interview with Smedley Ambler, Berkeley, 12/05

….So I was alone in New York, without a job, and I called my parents and they helped me cross the country by plane back to Berkeley. That was winter of 1969. I spent 1969 in Berkeley’s counterculture.

What were you doing in the counterculture?

What was I doing? I wasn’t really doing anything! I was just being. Hanging out. Then Mother got a bequest from our uncle Harold’s estate, and she referred to it as a kind of nest egg, and I suddenly had the idea, why not use that for a bookstore? Because we as kids had always hoped to have a bookstore, and this little bit of money would be enough to start a small bookstore. I proposed this in December 1969 to Mother, and told her that there was an empty store on Haste street near Cody’s books that I thought we could afford, and I proposed that the way to determine what we should carry was that half of all the books should be by women and half should be by men.

How did you think of that?

Well, 1969 was really the beginning of the women’s liberation movement, in New York and the East Coast, and it was spreading to Berkeley and I was very interested in what they were doing. It seemed to me righteous. It was a righteous movement. So Mother agreed – Mother was an accountant, and she knew how to keep the books so that we wouldn’t spend ourselves out of existence, so in January of 1970 we opened Up Haste, on Haste Street up from Telegraph, and I was in charge of selecting the books. I went to the local book distributors and selected half books by women and half by men. And we had an immediate audience in the young women at the University of California, which was only three blocks away.

I quite consciously collected books for the store along the line of women’s liberation, and then filled it in as much as I could with other work by women. It ended up that we were carrying almost anything by women, no matter what the subject matter. Since women at that time were looking very generally toward a woman-based polis, they were interested in almost anything women had done. For instance, I remember finding books on immigrant women. Now that wasn’t a major preoccupation of the women’s movement itself, but it meant that individual women could come in and find something that intrigued them in our store.

Less than 6 months after we opened -- we had been carrying a women’s underground newspaper called It Ain’t Me, Babe, run by several older women, and they used to come in and we had long talks about lesbians in the women’s movement. It Ain’t Me, Babe found some money, I don’t know how, and opened up a bookstore just over the city boundaries in Oakland. After that we no longer had the full focus of the women interested in the women’s movement because some of them moved toward It Ain’t Me, Babe and their bookstore. But we had a good solid base in women’s reading, and they would come – women’s studies was just beginning to be taught at the university and I would purchase boxes full of books that were used in those courses and sell to the students. That kept us going.

Cody’s bookstore set up an independent section of women’s books in 1970 and also began to take away some of our customer base. In the beginning we had the market entirely. But of course it was always confusing because I was there, and I was the one selecting the books by women, and some women were aggravated by that. They were the ones that moved toward It Ain’t Me, Babe, and their store, because they were all women without any male adulteration!

Did you argue with them about your right to run a women’s bookstore?

No, I remember being afraid -- there was a movement suddenly in the spring of 1970 saying that women should beat up men that take advantage of women. I don’t remember if anyone actually did that or if it was just talked about, but I remember being afraid that some of these women would attack me for being involved in the women’s movement! Because I myself am gay, I was also interested in the gay liberation movement, and when Up Haste opened I was living with a young hippie named Wally, who convinced me to go to these dances that the Gay Liberation Front was putting on in a local church. So I began to connect with the Gay Liberation Front, and Up Haste carried – there wasn’t much literature in the beginning, but I carried about a shelf full of literature on gay rights for men, which was another thing that aggravated many of the women.

Was there no sympathy between the women’s movement and the gay men’s movement at that time?

No, there was no sympathy. And I was bothered that the women’s movement was increasingly anti gay men, so I went home one weekend and tried to work out my ideas. That weekend I wrote three -- screeds, you might say, of effeminist writing saying that the effeminist male supports the female in her endeavors to be independent and powerful. I published in Up Haste these three pieces that I called The Effeminist, and they attracted two other men, Jim Rankin and Nick Benton, and we began publishing a newspaper to try to attract other members. I think there were three issues all together. Three or four.

What was the effeminist position?

We experimented with the idea that the ordinary male is homosexual. The ordinary male who believes he is heterosexual is in fact homosexual. And the only men who had real relations with women were the effeminists. An effeminist was a man who saw that his primary allegiance was to women: first his mother, second if he was married his wife. The three of us had all started out with the Gay Liberation Organization, but we felt it was necessary to set up a different group of gay men who saw women as their primary context in society.

In 1971 we started a children’s section. Babette came back to Berkeley, and she was interested in children as well as the women’s movement, and we saw a way of adding a new section on children to the store. There was more and more material coming out of the women’s movement about children, and for children, and there was also a smaller group interested in children’s liberation. There were children’s books published by women’s collectives in North Carolina, for example, with a women's liberation perspective. They had published five or six of these books by 1971. Babette was interested in these, and we began to carry them and then to look for mainstream children’s books that treated the children, the boys and the girls, equally. Finally we ended up taking over the storefront next to Up Haste for the children’s material, and Babette was in charge of that. We carried your book – what was it called? Little Funny People by Pam, and so on.

Now, the women’s movement grew and grew, and by 1973 it had taken on the characteristics of a major media organization. It wasn’t mainly communicating through underground newspapers, it was communicating through major newspapers and television. Some women held on to the underground movement, and they continued to be our major customers, because we carried the underground women’s publications from all over the country, from Chicago, from Washington DC --

How did you find these publications?

I would go into all the other bookstores in Berkeley and find copies. Once you found one, you could easily find out about the others. There would be listings about people to meet in other parts of the country, for example, in any local underground paper.

Did you carry a lot of local publications? Did you have a lot of people coming in with stuff for consignment?

Yes. I didn’t carry everything, but I carried everything by women. I was more selective about what I carried by men. I tried to carry gay men actively, but other men, they fill the bookstores. I mean the women’s section of Cody’s was never more than a 10th of all the books they carried.

What was daily life at the store like? Did you have a lot of visitors? A lot of arguments?

That was the most important part of what was going on. It’s very hard to recreate the atmosphere. The very idea that Berkeley could have a bookstore that dealt only with radical movements! And not just the radical movements that were represented by New York publishing houses; the publications of the Trotskyists, who had their own publishing house, sold as well in Berkeley as mainstream New York publications. And there were other radical bookstores in the neighborhood. Just next to us was a Chinese Maoist group with publications from communist China, and down the street on Telegraph on the other side of Dwight way the Trotskyists had a bookstore.

So it was possible to have a bookstore that carried only Maoist books? You could pay the rent?

Within that – it seems just unbelievable, but within that context you could.

How were your relationships with the other bookstores in the area? Did you talk to the other political bookstores? Or the more general bookstores, Moes and Cody’s?

No. All adamantly independent. No communication at all! I didn’t particularly like Moe. The only thing I liked about Moe was that he carried underground publications from all over and I would go in there and find unusual left groups and radical groups. Moe himself – I never felt that he was interested in books. The way the store approached the sale of books didn’t attract me at all. It was the style of the store.

It was a more general store, was that what made it less interesting?

Yes, because at that time the pressure was on to have a perspective. For instance, Marxists – and I was more or less a Marxist -- were programmatically opposed to populists at that time, and Moe was essentially a populist. Populism was just radicalism without a program. Opposed to the establishment but with no program for society. There was no slant to the books, there was no perspective.

I liked the fact that Fred Cody was interested in small publishers of poetry. He carried them right near the entrance to the store: many small publishers of poetry. That I thought was Fred Cody’s perspective.

Did he carry underground newspapers also?

Yes, he did also. Everyone did. That was the whole source of the radical movement. Underground newspapers out of Berkeley, Ann Arbor, Washington DC, New York, Austin Texas...

How did you see the role of bookstores like Up Haste in radical politics?

Well, I was confused, because I accepted the Marxist criticism of the petit bourgeoise, and the strict Marxist groups were opposed to successful radical institutions like bookstores, because they were petit bourgeoise. If they made any money, if they made enough money to survive, they were petit bourgeoise and no longer radical. I never figured it out. I never came to a conclusion as to whether what I was doing was radical or bourgeoise

But what about the role of bookstores in distributing and disseminating these underground newspapers and radical publications? And as meeting places?

Well yes. Without bookstores how would you proselytize? So to me it was a no win situation. The Marxists were just impossible. You could have a bookstore, but you couldn’t make a profit. You couldn’t even make a living.

That doesn’t seem very fair!

Well, that was what it was all about.

Every couple of days I visit the Friends of the Berkeley Public Library book sale, which has its home in a neglected mall off Telegraph Ave under a parking lot. The Friends sale is easy to miss: north of the cashier, across from the elevators, it’s out of the way even in this out of the way mall. Parked outside its doors is a cart marked Free, and this is my destination.

I am here on assignment: how better to study the ecosystem of the book trade, the mysterious circulatory processes and agents of the Interstitial Library, Telegraph Ave itself, than by hanging out at the Free cart? The best part is (and this is what quickens my step as I get closer, practically running up the steps at the Channing entrance to the mall, past the frame shop, Revolution Books and the mailroom) there might be something really great there today. You never know.

The Free cart gets a lot of action. This is where books donated to the Friends go when they’re deemed unworthy of a place on the shelves inside, or have failed to sell at the Friends’ already rock bottom prices. On the cart you might find de-acquisitioned library books stamped DISCARD, outdated textbooks, Readers Digest condensed classics, pocket book westerns, mysteries and science fiction, multi-volume encyclopedias with volumes missing, diet books from crazes past….To be weeded out by the Friends a book has to have fallen pretty low. On the other hand the Friends are amateurs, and sometimes there’s a real prize. Last week I found a nice Ace double, a handful of Ross MacDonald pockets and a bound volume containing the complete 1941 run of Popular Science's Home Workshop magazine. Great illustrations.

The cart’s offerings change throughout the day, so it gets a steady stream of hopeful visitors, many of them regulars - the man who hawks paperbacks on the corner outside of Cody’s for a quarter, homeless people from the Ave looking for something to sell at Moes, serious book scouts, a certain librarian on his lunch break. It’s a gamble; some days there’s an air of excitement around the cart -- Friends bringing books by the handful, extra free boxes laid out nearby for the overflow, scouts swarming around.

Other days the books are crap, nothing but that set of Reader’s Digest classics that’s been sitting there for weeks and that Extra Large Print Tom Clancy. Then the cart is a bummer, feels like the end of the road. For books and maybe people, too. Free cart mood swing: one minute you’re a bold adventurer, a prospector with a secret map, the next you’re a lowly carrion eater.

It happened to me on Friday, a real crap day at the cart. While I stood disconsolately by, a man came up with an armload of books and actually returned them to the cart. I figured he had tried them at Moes and Shakespeare with no luck. It was nice of him not to leave them on the street.

Bloomsday. I found a copy of Ulysses in a stack of abandoned books in the Chandler building. The first 40 pages were missing. I took it anyway and read it on my way home.

Owen and I are walking up the Avenue on our way to Strada.
Why Incububula? he asks.
When I named the blog, I tell him, I thought it was going to be about sexual obsession in a rare book library.
It's kind of a sexy name, he says.
Incunabula plus incubus, I explain. Early printed books plus a male sex demon.
Plus incubate, says Owen.
Which is the ancient Greek form of meditation, I say. You lie on your back for hours in a cave, making yourself receptive to the gods.
A rare book library is a little like a cave, Owen says. But if you're on your back in the stacks, you're probably doing something you shouldn't.
Exactly, I say.
It's too bad, in a way, says Owen. I would have liked reading that blog.
Well now it's a blog about book obsession on Telegraph Ave, I say. Hey, isn't that Scabby the book scout? I point to the food carts on Bancroft. A familiar figure hovers there, an eyesore in a pink and orange shirt.
Yeah, that's him, says Owen. I heard he had a new outfit. Ow, that hurts! Orange and pink Scabby, ugh.
You heard? I ask. What is this, word on the avenue? Scabby sighting?
I make a mental note: blog this.
Well you know, Owen says. Book scouts are getting a little scarce these days.

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!”