A surprisingly backbreaking job, magazines. I don't know what it's like now, but back then, there were about eighteen different monthly magazines devoted just to sailing. We stocked all of them, and sold none of them. So once a month, I would remove about seventy-two sailing mags from the shelf and replace them with
about seventy-two new ones. Same for every other hobby you can imagine. Plus news, fashion, politics, sports, TV/film. I would put about 150 obsolete magazines at a time into a box and haul it to the back, then repeat, again and again.
And all the while, I'd keep an eye on my Classics bay to see if anyone was about to
discover a new mass-market Signet or Bantam. Or hell, even Dover Thrift.
It just occurred to me that I took that Books-a-Million job in February of 2006. Twenty years! So long ago. Still, I wasn't some bright-eyed aspiring lit student, even then; I'd finished undergrad the previous year, at almost
thirty.
Which must mean that I'm now almost fifty? What's happening.
I no longer think everything published after 1850 is worthless. I don't even know
what my deal was back then; where this weird and misguided (and thankfully brief) elitism came from. A few months later, I transported it with me to Boston for my equally misguided (and thankfully equally brief) MFA stint.
But those little paperbacks still tickle something in me.
