I worked the floor of The Albert Britnell Bookshop on Saturdays. On Mondays and Fridays I worked phones (I still can't stand to hear a telephone ring), and on Tuesdays and Thursdays I would head into the basement to work Receiving with my buddy Kristjan. He loved those Saturdays when the Hare Krishnas would parade down Yonge Street with their elephant.
He would stop outside, smoke a cigarette and look at all the beautiful East Indian women. He wasn't too hard on the eyes either, frankly. I would join him for a few minutes, then scurry back inside and help customers.
I spent Wednesdays with my new daughter. When my young bride and I first married I had been at the store long enough to get weekends off. Then she gave birth to our daughter and I went back to the bookstore on Saturdays. My wife worried about me doing a job on Saturdays. "You don't need to," I said. "Scott Dagostino makes every Saturday an event I don't want to miss."
This was true. Friends of Scott's and writers for Fab magazine etc. and even owners and workers at other bookstores would show up on Saturdays and hold court. Scott always made sure that others, including myself, were part of the action.
Otherwise I tidied the "Fiction" shelves at the east, back end of the store. Or I might disappear fetching a Special Order. Those Special Orders were often the bane of our existence.
I will never forget the smell of Special Order paper from the dot-matrix printer of the store computer upstairs.
The upstairs was typically reserved for bookstore staff members. Accounting was at the very front/west bank of windows where the large (by any standard) computer was. There was a Customer Service desk at the back far-east wall where I made all my catalog orders. This was beside a small kitchen and smoking room (hugging the windowless north wall ("I want us to be 'Smoke-free in '93,'" said the older owner. ("Well it's, 'Fuck you' in '92," said Kristjan over a cigarette)). The kitchen was followed by a washroom with toilet and sink. A photocopier and receptionist's desk faced the top of the north-west stairs.
Three white-and-green computer monitors were on desks that faced the southern wall. Each desk had a black, plastic telephone with four lines. I used one of these telephones to contact customers (or, better yet, their answering machines) with the unhappy news Britnell's was unable to obtain this "new" JD Salinger book.*
I was puttering with fiction when Tamara, a young staffer came back and said, "Could you do me a favour? Climb into one of the windows and get the last copy of this book?" I nodded Sure, and off we went to the front of store at the west. "Thanks," she said. "I'd do the job myself, but—" She gestured at the miniskirt she was wearing.
I halted. "Actually," I said, "could you do me a favour...?"
Swat!
Other Britnell's memories are here, here and here. Wild About Ari is a Peter Demas film (Peter was also a Britnell's co-worker! The short takes me back to those days in downtown Toronto, boy oh boy. Now I'm the village resident, both kids are in Toronto, and I couldn't be happier and prouder. Hey, there's Edith, another Britnell's co-worker! And Kristjan!). Wild About Ari was at the Toronto International Film Festival in 1994. Peter Demas has done a great deal more.
Which was titled, Hapworth 16, 1924. "A rose by any other name," really...
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