TOWER BOOKS
In 1994, at the age of 36, I found myself unemployed and in need of money. A downturn in the real-estate market had cost me my job in the title-insurance industry. Outside of that industry, I had few marketable skills. But Julie’s salary alone wasn’t quite enough to keep us afloat. To tide us over until another title-insurance job came along, I decided to look for work in a bookstore. I applied at a few local stores in Auburn and was rejected because I had no retail experience. Fortunately, I had a friend whose brother was a longtime Tower Books employee. My friend’s brother put in a good word for me with the manager of a Tower Books store in Sacramento, and I was hired. That’s how pathetic my resume was: I needed an insider to pull strings for me in order to get a minimum-wage job at a big chain store.
Each employee in our giant store was assigned to a different section of books. When you weren’t engaged in your three-hour shift at the cash register, you were expected to be in your section stocking books, neatening up the shelves, and answering questions for customers. Because I had spent almost all of my time in the literature sections of bookstores I never realized how many damn sections they had. Our store had an automotive section, sports section, children’s section, parenting section, cooking section, reference section, religion section, political section, history section, and at least a dozen others. I was told that I would have no say in what section I was assigned to. The manager would put me in whatever section needed me the most, and there I would stay for the foreseeable future. A day or two after I was hired, the manager gave me the choice of two options: the children’s section or the fiction and literature section. She told me that traditionally the fiction/literature section was the least desirable among employees because it was the largest in the store. It included the romance section where books were rotated on and off the shelves at an amazing rate. New romance titles hit the store every day and old ones had to be pulled from the shelves in mere weeks if their sales numbers didn’t justify a longer stay. The fiction section also included a paperback bestseller table upon which a hundred or so of the most popular mass-market paperbacks were displayed in a sort of pyramid-like arrangement. The books we had the most copies of went onto the middle of the table and were stacked the highest. As the books got closer to the edge of the table, the stacks became smaller. The size of the stacks changed all the time because, after all, these were bestsellers and people were constantly buying them. Thus the table was a nightmare to keep in order. Despite all these drawbacks I jumped at a chance to oversee the fiction and literature section. I figured that five hours of my workday would be spent among fellow fiction and literature lovers like me. I envisioned myself discussing George Eliot and Edith Wharton with other lovers of the classics. But I was living in a fool’s paradise.
I arrived at Tower a day or two after O.J. Simpson was arrested for murdering his wife and her friend. The co-manager of our store, a crusty veteran of the retail wars who had been with the Tower chain since the 1960s, told me to be ready to clear space for O.J.-related books on our paperback bestseller table. Since the sensational murder case had become headline news only a few days earlier, I figured I had at least a month or so before I had to worry about putting any O.J. books on display. Wrong. Within a week of the famous low-speed chase of Simpson’s white Bronco on the L.A. Freeway, paperback books about the case began pouring into the store. At one point we had at least a dozen books on the subject. Even more amazing was that people actually bought them. In droves. Oh, they smiled self-deprecatingly when they came up to the counter and chided themselves for buying such trash, but they bought them nonetheless. The books were so popular that I could never seem to keep the mass-market pyramid pointy. If I left it unattended for five minutes it would start to look like an ancient Egyptian ruin.
I figured that the O.J. Books were an aberration. The murders in question were being played up in the press as “the crime of the century” (considering that they occurred in the same century as the Holocaust, this struck me as at tad inflated, but that’s the media for you), and so it seemed as if people had been whipped into a frenzy of bad-book buying unlike anything ever seen before, at least not since the previous crime of the century. Surely, I thought, O.J. will quickly cop a plea and the hysteria will die down and our customers will return to buying serious, intelligent books again. But that didn’t happen. During the year or so that I worked at Tower, O.J. books dominated our bestseller list. And when Simpson’s own book, “I Want To Tell You,” was published, it seemed as if every African-American within fifty miles showed up at the store to purchase a copy. Frequently, entire African-American families would arrive at the store, dressed as if for church, and stand in line together to purchase a copy of O.J.’s book. Perhaps they were coming from a church where the pastor had advised them to get hold of a copy of the book and read it for themselves. Judge not lest ye be judged, might have been the theme of the sermon. I don’t know what, exactly, inspired this phenomenon. The cheap paperback quickies that came out in the immediate aftermath of the arrest were snatched up by no particular type of customer. Those books were purchased by old and young, blacks and whites, males and females. But white people, it seemed, had no particular interest in what O.J. himself had to say. People who had eagerly, if somewhat shamefacedly, rushed into the store to buy the early exploitative paperbacks now clucked in disapproval at the table on which we kept our eight gazillion copies of “I Want To Tell You.” “Why do you want to help line the pockets of that murderer?” they would self-righteously demand of me and my fellow clerks.
All this was very depressing to me. I came to Tower Books hoping to discuss fine literature with serious readers, to discuss the English language with fellow word lovers. Instead I spent much of my time discussing a celebrity murder case I had absolutely no interest in. Customers were constantly asking me and my fellow clerks, “Have you read any of the O.J. Books?” “Are any of them any good?” “Do they sell well?” “Do you have that O.J. book that was mentioned on 20/20 (or Nightline, or Barbara Walters, or whatever) last night?” There were times when I wanted to stand on top of my mass-market pyramid and start flinging O.J. books across the store like King Kong making his last stand atop the Empire State Building.
But it quickly became evident to me that, even if there had been no O.J. Simpson murder case, my job at Tower Books would have afforded me very few opportunities to commune with fellow literature lovers. During my time at Tower, there were about ten titles that, along with all the O.J. tomes, probably accounted for close to eighty percent of the store’s overall sales. And of those ten titles, not one was even remotely literary. My stay at Tower coincided with the explosive popularity of the book “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus,” by John Gray, Ph.D. (more about that doctorate in a moment). For a while we were selling about 100 copies a day of this relationship guide. We sold nearly as many copies of another relationship guide, “Are You The One For Me?: Knowing Who’s Right and Avoiding Who’s Wrong” by Barbara DeAngelis, Ph.D. Interestingly, the authors of these two schlocky relationship guides were once married to each other. Every time a customer laid one of these books down on the counter, I longed to ask her (men never bought these books): “If a relationship expert can’t even manage to stay married to another relationship expert, how can he or she possibly be much of a relationship expert? If either of them knew anything about making a relationship work, wouldn’t they still be married to each other?” In fact, as the long dreary months went by and these books continued to dominate our non-O.J. bestseller list, I did actually raise this question with a few customers. But it did no good. Gray and DeAngelis were being celebrated on TV as relationship experts and that, apparently, was enough to convince large numbers of American women that they couldn’t live without the advice of these two phony “doctors.” (According to Wikipedia, Gray’s doctorate was issued by Columbia Pacific University, a correspondence school that was notorious for being nothing more than a bogus-diploma mill and has since been shut down by the government. DeAngelis’s website states that she possesses a Ph.D. but doesn’t specify where she received it. It has always been my humble opinion that if a Ph.D. recipient’s official bio doesn’t mention where the Ph.D. was received, then there’s probably no need to refer to that person as “Doctor.”)
Another massive bestseller during my stint at Tower was a wretched tome called “Mutant Message Down Under,” by Marlo Morgan. Figuring that it was some sort of clever parody of tabloid journalism like Francine Prose’s “Bigfoot Dreams” or Arnold Sawislak’s “Dwarf Rapes Nun, Flees In UFO” (one of the greatest book titles of all time), I picked up and attempted to read “Mutant Message” on a slow workday. I’d like to describe it for you, but it is indescribably awful. It was self-published in 1990 and touted as the true story of an American woman’s spiritual awakening during a walkabout with some Australian aboriginals. The book became a bit of a cult classic and was republished in 1994 by Harper Collins, which promoted it as a novel. The author, however, continued to claim that the events described in the book actually occurred exactly as she described them. When experts on aboriginal culture pointed out her many errors, and when actual aboriginals began protesting that the book was an ignorant exploitation of their culture, Morgan issued an apology and retracted her assertion that the book was nonfiction. None of this seemed to have any effect on the book’s enormous popularity, however, and when the controversy blew over, Morgan once again began to claim that the book was autobiographical. She even wrote a sequel called “Mutant Message From Forever,” but, mercifully, I was no longer in the bookselling business when it was published.
Every bit as successful as “Mutant Message” was James Redfield’s “The Celestine Prophecy,” which was touted variously as a novel, a spiritual meditation, an environmental manifesto, and a self-improvement guide. What it actually was, however, was new-age claptrap. But while I was at Tower it sold a bazillion copies. It was so successful that the publisher brought out an accompanying workbook called “The Celestine Prophesy: An Experiential Guide,” which was aimed at “study groups” seeking to delve deeper into the nine truths revealed in the novel. A coworker and I used to amuse ourselves in the slow late-night hours by trying to think up book titles that were sure to become bestsellers. The object of the game was to combine elements of at least two or three current bestsellers into one godawful title. Eventually “O.J.’s Mutant Prophecy From Mars,” became our codename for all bestselling schlock. This coworker’s name was Dave. A 17-year-old high school student and book nerd who was singularly unsuccessful at getting dates, Dave told me he sought a job at Tower because he thought it would be a good way of meeting girls who were as bookish as he was. Whenever a teenage girl entered the store while Dave and I were working the registers together, we’d try to guess her literary tastes just by sizing up her appearance. If a particularly promising young woman came through the door, I might say to Dave, “Just watch, I’ll bet she’s here to buy Jane Austen’s complete works. Get ready, this could be your dream date.” But Dave was a glass-half-empty kind of guy. He’d usually shake his head and say, “Naw, she’s got ‘O.J.’s Mutant Prophecy From Mars’ written all over her.” Sadly, Dave was virtually always right. The women who came into our store were almost always there to buy some trashy bestseller. We sold little, if any, Jane Austen.
Dave, like almost all of my coworkers, was exactly half my age. I was accustomed to working in the insurance industry with a bunch of middle-aged, white-collar types, so it was refreshing to suddenly find myself surrounded by young kids with orange hair and torn jeans and baggy T-shirts. At night, I’d go home and regale Julie with stories about my coworkers. Body piercings were just becoming popular at that time, and every day some coworker of mine would be showing off a new piercing. This was especially true of Mondays, because most of the piercings seemed to have been acquired on weekends, after a lot of partying and illegal alcohol consumption. Although lip- and tongue- and eyebrow-studs are now fairly commonplace, they were unusual back then. I could always get a rise out of Julie by describing the tortured flesh of my teenage coworkers. I remember a cute young girl named Carly who, one Monday morning, went around to each her coworkers and lifted up her shirt to show off her brand-new nipple piercing. The piercing had occurred so recently that the nipple was still swollen and discolored, definitely not pleasant to lookout. Likewise, after a girl named Evie had her navel pierced, the skin around her belly button swelled up so badly it completely closed off the navel, making it look more like a small vagina than a belly button. And then there was the day a girl named Linnea showed up with an eyebrow that was swollen and crusted with dried blood. I thought maybe she’d been beaten by a boyfriend. But, no, that wasn’t what happened at all. Linnea, who normally wore small metal hoops that pierced the flesh of her eyebrow, had grabbed a comb in order to give her long coppery hair a quick grooming before coming to work. But the teeth of the comb had got caught in one of her eyebrow hoops and nearly ripped it out of her flesh.
But if I found my coworkers somewhat strange, they found me at least as odd. One of the things that amused them was my diet. On my lunch break, I would open up a brown paper bag and pull out various gourmet items that Julie had packed for me to eat. While my coworkers all snacked on fast-food burgers and tacos and shakes and fries, I would be dining on stuffed potato skins, strawberry yogurt pie with graham cracker crust, six-layer vegetarian lasagna, and other exotic dishes. Usually these were leftovers from the previous evening’s dinner. My teenage colleagues, who appeared to have never eaten anything that didn’t come from a drive-thru window, were fascinated by my meals. They asked for a list of the ingredients, an explanation of how it was prepared, a description of the flavor. But whenever I offered a bite to any of them, they recoiled in horror, as if I had invited them to share a bloody piece of roadkill with me.
Another thing that set me apart was that I liked to read on my lunch breaks. Most of the teenagers who worked at Tower Books had originally applied for a job at the Tower Records store right next door. Jobs at Tower Records were highly coveted by local teens, because record store employees got to listen to loud music all day and could take their pick of all sorts of free promotional materials: cds, posters, concert tickets, T-shirts, etc. Few teenagers ever applied for work at Tower Books, so the manager of the record store would send over his excess applications to the manager of our store. Thus, the bookstore was populated with employees who tended to be far more interested in popular music than in literature of any kind. My coworkers would ask me, “How can you stand to read a book after spending all day selling them and stocking them and tracking them down for customers?” I’d just shrug and explain that my love of books was the reason I took the job in the first place. To my coworkers, I must have seemed like an alien from outerspace. While they frittered away their lunch breaks chatting about TV and music and snarfing down Big Macs and Whoppers, I’d sit in a corner and dine on leftover grilled salmon with roasted-corn relish and read a novel by Graham Greene or Evelyn Waugh.
But the thing that most fascinated my coworkers was the way I smelled. I didn’t wear cologne to work. What my coworkers liked was the smell of my clothes. I wore a freshly laundered shirt to work every day. This is standard practice in the white-collar world of the insurance industry. My clothes had the fresh linen-y smell of the fabric softener Julie and I used in the dryer. But apparently this was a foreign odor to my coworkers, who all dressed in T-shirts that they appeared never to wash. One girl, Meghan, used to come in every morning, stand beside me, and just sniff the shoulders of my shirts for a minute or so. Every now and then, she’d summon another 17-year-old coworker to join in the experience. “Come smell Kevin,” she’d say. “He smells so clean!”
Another phenomenon at Tower was the influence of Oprah Winfrey on book sales. I had never seen Oprah’s TV program and didn’t know anyone who watched it. At least I didn’t know any one who admitted to watching it. But by the time I arrived at Tower it was well known among the employees that once every week or so, at four o’clock in the afternoon, there would be a huge demand for a previously obscure title simply because it had been promoted on Oprah’s show that day. The Oprah show aired at three o’clock in the afternoon in Sacramento. When it ended, at four, our phones would be clogged by callers wanting to know if we had a copy of whatever book Oprah happened to have plugged that day (thankfully, she didn’t plug a book on every show). A few savvy customers were smart enough to call before the show actually ended. One day, shortly after I started working at Tower, I was at the customer-service counter when the phone rang and a customer asked me if we stocked a book called “Money Doesn’t Grow On Trees.” I believe it was a guide for parents interested in teaching their children about money. I looked it up in the computer and found that we had three copies of the book in stock. “Yes,” I told the customer, and then she asked me to place a copy on hold for her. A few minutes later another caller asked about the same book. By 3:55 p.m. all three of our copies were spoken for. Then at four o’clock the blitz really began. Never having experienced the phenomenon, I didn’t know what the hell was happening. I started describing it to Evie, but she just held up her hand to silence me and said, “Oprah.” Not being a daytime TV watcher, I had no idea who Oprah Winfrey was, but Evie quickly brought me up to speed. She told me that we would get a huge influx of phone calls over the next 24 hours. We would probably end up ordering 100 copies of the book for various customers. But, five or six days later, when the books arrived, few of the customers would bother to come into the store to pick up the copy they had ordered. By then, Oprah would be promoting another book and the whole phenomenon would start all over again. Eventually, I believe, bookstore owners became sophisticated enough to find out in advance which books were going to be promoted on Oprah and then order enough copies to satisfy the anticipated surge in demand. But when I first came to work at Tower, meeting the demand for Oprah-promoted books was still pretty much a hit-or-miss proposition.
If our store had been located in a university town, like nearby Davis, we would have undoubtedly been dealing with a more intellectual clientele and the influence of Oprah Winfrey might have been less profound. Alas, the store I worked in was located in a relatively lowbrow neighborhood. We sold a lot of gun and girly magazines, automotive repair guides, books of affirmations (“Life’s Little Instruction Book” et al), books about angels (for some reason these were hugely popular in 1994), and books by Rush Limbaugh and Tom Clancy. Generally, however, it was celebrity that seemed to influence book sales in our store the most. If O.J. Simpson had been an unemployed plumber, no one in our neighborhood would have bothered to read books about him, no matter what his crimes. But any whiff of celebrity attached to a book would generally guarantee healthy sales. One day I was standing at the customer-service counter when an elderly lady, perhaps 70, came into the store and looked around at all the books with a bewildered expression on her face. “Can I help you?” I asked. She was dressed very prettily in an out-of-date sort of way – a long, calico-print dress, white stockings, sensible brown shoes. I took her for, perhaps, a retired school librarian looking to reacquaint herself with some of the classics she had recommended through the years to her students. But she came over to the counter and said, “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever been in a bookstore before in my life.” This set off a few alarm bells in my head. God only knew what she might be looking for. She seemed too refined to be the “O.J.’s Mutant Prophecy From Mars” type. And it was too early in the day for her visit to have been inspired by Oprah.
“Is there a book I can help you find?” I asked her.
“Yes,” she said. “I’ve heard that Tim Taylor has written a book, and I’d like to buy a copy of it.”
“Tim Taylor?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said, “the young man from that TV program ‘Tool Time’.”
I looked up both “Tool Time” and “Tim Taylor” in our computer and didn’t find what she wanted. Fortunately, I was enlightened by another of my 17-year-old coworkers, Linnea, who happened to walk by and see that I was at a loss. Linnea asked the woman what she was looking for and then quickly located a copy for her. The book turned out to have been written by Tim Allen, the star of a TV sitcom called “Home Improvement.” Apparently, on the program, Allen played a character named Tim Taylor, the host of a fictional home-improvement program called, you guessed it, “Tool Time.” Since the book was easily located and the customer satisfied, the incident hardly seemed worth commenting on for Linnea. But I delayed her and tried to point out just how seriously wrong the incident seemed to me. “Think of it, Linnea,” I said. “Here’s a woman who has been alive for probably seven decades – approximately four times your current lifespan – and the first time she feels the need to go into a bookstore is when she hears that the fictional star of a fictional TV show has written a book?”
Linnea seemed nonplussed by my amazement. “So?” she said, raising an eyebrow at me (or perhaps it was still just a little bit swollen).
“Come on, Linnea: no incident of the entire previous seventy years has ever inspired her to wander inside a bookstore, no curiosity about the Kennedy assassination, or Watergate, or even the goddamn O.J. Simpson murders has ever compelled that woman to walk into a bookstore. No big bestseller of the last fifty years, nothing by Stephen King, or Mario Puzo, or even Grace Metalious, for godsakes, ever managed to lure her into a bookstore before. But after 70 years of complete book abstinence, she decides to lose her literary cherry only because she heard that a fictional character named Tim Taylor, who sounds as if he is a thinly disguised version of Bob Villa and is played on TV by an actor named Tim Allen, has written a book – only then does she decide to finally take her first foray into a bookstore, to buy a book that even Tim Allen probably didn’t write much of, a book that was probably ghostwritten by some old-time gag-writing hacks hired by a publishing firm hoping to cash in on the popularity of a goddamn sitcom? That doesn’t strike you as a wee bit perverse, Linnea?”
Linnea didn’t bother to answer. She just laughed and moved on. Being younger than me and having worked in the bookstore longer I had, she had a better grasp of the connection between retail sales and pop-cultural celebrity than I did. No doubt, Linnea considered me a greater oddity than the “Tool Time” woman.
Eventually, though, I became as accustomed as Linnea to oddball exchanges with customers. After a few months they barely even fazed me. Once a woman (almost all our book buyers were women) of about thirty came into the store with a copy of Thomas Hardy’s novel “A Pair of Blue Eyes” in her hands. She laid it down on the counter in front of me along with the receipt. “I bought the wrong book by mistake,” she said. “Is there any way I can exchange this book for the right one?” The book was in good shape and the receipt was less than 30 days old, so I told her, “Sure. Go grab the book you want and I’ll handle the exchange for you.” She came back up to the counter with a book whose title was something like “How To Supercharge Your Harley Davidson Motorcycle.”
“Wow, you really did make a mistake,” I joked.
She nodded, embarrassed, but didn’t offer any further explanation. After she left the store I tried to fathom what might have inspired such an incongruous exchange of books. Perhaps she had a boyfriend who loved motorcycles. And maybe his birthday was rolling around and she had no money. And perhaps, being an avid reader, she had a lot of books in her house. So she grabbed her most recently purchased book and exchanged it for a gift to give to her boyfriend. Of course it was also possible that she suffered from some extreme form of dyslexia. I noticed that the letters T-H-O-M-A-S H-A-R-D-Y could be found in the title of the motorcycle book, so perhaps she really did just make a mistake. Eventually I gave up trying to solve the riddle and reshelved the Hardy novel. Ironically, it was probably the only Thomas Hardy novel purchased out of that store during my tenure as a clerk, and now it had been returned in exchange for a motorcycle manual. Talk about life’s little ironies. That pretty much epitomized the demand for serious literature in our store, which was practically zero.
One day I asked Glenn, the co-manager and long-time Tower employee, why the hell we bothered stocking literature at all. Every now and then there would be a mini-run on some classic book that the local high-school had assigned to its students (“To Kill A Mockingbird,” “The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin,” “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”), but that was about the extent of our literature sales (and the kids who bought those books usually did so under duress, arriving at the cash register looking as though they were reporting to the principal’s office for punishment). And yet the fiction/literature section was the largest section in our store. Granted, pop fiction, mystery novels, and romance novels, made up the bulk of the section, but we nonetheless carried an impressive number of literary titles that almost no one ever purchased. Everywhere you turned in the fiction aisles, you’d see the aquamarine spines of Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics, the yellow spines of Penguin Classics, the black spines of Oxford World Classics, the copper-colored spines of The Modern Library Classics. Although I was happy the books were there, I couldn’t understand how a for-profit operation could justify carrying such dead weight. So I turned to Glenn for answers. He had started out working at a Tower Records store in the 1960s. In those days, he said, he and his fellow clerks used to go out into the parking lot and smoke pot during their breaks. If you wanted to be a record clerk at Tower in those days you almost had to be a pothead, he explained. No one would take record recommendations seriously from someone who didn’t at least look like he smoked a lot of pot. In those early years Tower Records was one of the first stores to stock albums by some of the more esoteric rock and roll acts. “We had lots of Frank Zappa records and Moby Grape and Captain Beefheart and Wavy Gravy and Country Joe and the Fish,” Glenn told me. “Not too many people ever bought that stuff, but we played it all day long on the sound system and we pushed it hard when customers asked for a recommendation. We never made much money on that stuff but we figured it was the kind of music a store like ours ought to be promoting. We made most of our money selling bubblegum pop-music shit, but we still kept Frank Zappa’s and Captain Beefheart’s entire catalogs on hand in the store in case somebody came in looking for ‘Weasels Ripped My Flesh’ or ‘Burnt Weenie Sandwich’ or ‘Trout Mask Replica.’ That’s just always been the Tower way, man. Sell ‘em the shit they want, but keep the good stuff on hand just in case. Nobody buys serious literature in this store, but we keep it out there for ‘em anyway. Who knows, maybe one of those pop-fiction junkies will pick up a Pynchon novel by mistake and start reading it and experience an epiphany right there in the fiction aisle, man. Maybe he’ll become enlightened. That’s why we keep the stuff around, man.”
It didn’t make any financial sense to dedicate so many expensive square feet of store space to literature that none of our customers seemed to be interested in, but from the perspective of a true booklover, the logic was unimpeachable. After my little pep talk with Glenn, I resolved to try to actually push the literary titles, to engage in the activity that bookshop owners refer to as “hand-selling.” If I saw a customer glancing at a Robert Ludlum novel, I’d sidle up to her and suggest that she might want to check out Graham Greene’s “Our Man In Havana.” “It’s a spy novel too,” I’d say encouragingly. If someone came up to the counter with Ann Rice’s latest tome, I’d tell her, “If you’re interested in Gothic fiction, you might want to check out Mervyn Peake’s “Gormenghast” trilogy, or perhaps “The Monk” by Matthew Lewis. It never worked. No one ever wanted my unsolicited advice. Perhaps if I had looked more like a pot smoker…
Another strange phenomenon at Tower was the large number of people who came in and purchased books for incarcerated prisoners. We were always being asked to ship books to various jails and penitentiaries. We even had a list of prison addresses on hand in the customer-service department in case the customer wasn’t sure of the address of the prison her boyfriend/husband/whatever was staying in. As I recall there were regulations that made it difficult for private parties to send packages to prisoners directly. Apparently there was less red tape involved at the receiving end if the books were shipped from a bookstore rather than a relative of an inmate. At any rate, we shipped at least a couple of packages a week to various penal institutions. And then there were the so-called “ripped returns.” To save money on shipping, bookstores aren’t required to return unsold mass-market paperbacks to their publishers after their shelf life has expired. Instead the bookstore employees just have to tear off the cover of the book and return that for a refund or a credit. You’ve seen the little warning paragraph in countless paperback books: “If this book was purchased without a cover it was sold illegally…” Under their agreements with the publishers, bookstore owners are required to destroy the paperbacks from which the covers have been ripped for return. But, at Tower at least, these books were seldom destroyed. Usually they were divvied up among the employees. But we had so many ripped returns in our store that the employees couldn’t possibly have carried them all home. Instead, we boxed up the extras (after weeding out anything pornographic or otherwise deemed inappropriate) and shipped them off to various regional prisons and jails. According to my manager, this was a blatant violation of our agreement with the publishers. But nobody at Tower liked to destroy a book. And since we already shipped so many books to penal institutions already, sending our ripped returns to jailhouses seemed like a good way of killing two birds with one stone. We saved ourselves the trouble of destroying the books and we helped improve the lives of a handful of prisoners around the state. I still have a few dozen ripped returns left over from my days at Tower. Their titles and authors are written in felt pen on their naked white spines. In my little private library they constitute a distinct series of books, just like the Penguin Classics and Modern Library editions. I like to think of them as the spineless classics, although technically speaking, they are merely coverless, not spineless.
After about a year at Tower, I called it quits. I personally must have rung up about ten thousand copies of “O.J.’s Mutant Prophecy From Mars” and I just couldn’t take it any more. A local start-up magazine that was looking for freelance writers contacted me and promised me plenty of assignments. None of these assignments ever came through, but the prospect of legitimate writing work enticed me into giving up the bookselling gig. A few years ago, when the entire Tower chain went bankrupt and closed all its stores, I found myself reminiscing fondly about my days as a book clerk. For a brief shining while, Glenn and I and a few other true believers, like my nerdy teenage coworker Dave, tried, like the fictional bookseller in Christopher Morley’s “Parnassus on Wheels” to bring “salvation” to “stunted little minds.” We tried to give our customers artistic epiphanies, to bring them enlightenment. We tried to bring intellectual substance and literary sustenance into their lives. But for the most part all they wanted was the dirt on O.J. Simpson.