Description

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 its 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 shelvesand then behind the counter into the overstuffed basement and up the spinestacked attic stairs of your favorite neighborhood bookshop From his childhood in rural Ontario where at the village jumble sale he bought poetry volumes for their pebbledleather covers alone to his allbutaccidental 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 nobilitythe characters fictional and notwho 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 booksand inevitably make up an unforgettable life