A Factotum in the Book Trade

A Factotum in the Book Trade

by Marius Kociejowski
A Factotum in the Book Trade

A Factotum in the Book Trade

by Marius Kociejowski

eBook

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Overview

The bookshop is, and will always be, the soul of the trade. What happens there does not happen elsewhere. The multifariousness of human nature is more on show there than anywhere else, and I think it’s because of books, what they are, what they release in ourselves, and what they become when we make them magnets to our desires.

A memoir of a life in the antiquarian book trade, A Factotum in the Book Trade is a journey between the shelves—and then behind the counter, into the overstuffed basement, and up the spine-stacked attic stairs of your favourite neighbourhood bookshop. From his childhood in rural Ontario, where at the village jumble sale he bought poetry volumes for their pebbled-leather covers alone, to his all-but-accidental entrance into the trade in London and the career it turned into, poet and travel writer Marius Kociejowski recounts his life among the buyers, sellers, customers, and literary nobility—the characters, fictional and not—who populate these places we all love. Cataloging their passions and pleasures, oddities and obsessions, A Factotum in the Book Trade is a journey through their lives, and a story of the serendipities and collisions of fate, the mundane happenings and indelible encounters, the friendships, feuds, losses, and elations that characterize the business of books—and, inevitably, make up an unforgettable life.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781771964579
Publisher: Biblioasis
Publication date: 04/26/2022
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 192
File size: 2 MB

About the Author

Marius Kociejowski, born 1949, is a poet, essayist and travel writer. Among the books he has written are The Street Philosopher and the Holy Fool – A Syrian Journey, now reissued by Eland, and a sequel, The Pigeon Wars of Damascus published by Biblioasis in 2010. His first collection of poetry, Coast (Greville Press, 1990) was awarded the Cheltenham Prize. His most recent books are God’s Zoo: Artists, Exiles, Londoners (Carcanet, 2014), The Pebble Chance: prose & feuilletons (Biblioasis, 2014), Zoroaster’s Children and other travels (Biblioasis, 2015) and Collected Poems (Carcanet, 2019). He has recently completed another travel book, The Serpent Coiled in Naples. He lives in London, England where, until recently, he worked as an antiquarian bookseller.

Table of Contents

A Floating World 1

The Road I'd Later Take 21

A Giraffe in Edinburgh Zoo 47

The Pope of Long Acre 63

A Paragon of Seedy Exactitude 87

Hawks and Magpies 109

The Loneliness of The Collector 127

The Testament of Charlotte B. 149

The Disembowelling of Phantoms 185

Black Mischief and Subterfuge 217

The Square Root of Obsession 243

Is Goldilocks Jewish? 273

The Man Collecting Names 301

The Polish for Goodbye 321

Coda 345

Acknowledgements 349

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