Marius Kociejowski - A Factotum in the Book Trade: A Memoir

Biblioasis

Windsor, Ontario

Copyright Marius Kociejowski, 2022

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher or a license from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright license visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: A factotum in the book trade : a memoir / Marius Kociejowski.

Names: Kociejowski, Marius, author.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210354771 |

Canadiana (ebook) 20210354798 | ISBN 9781771964562 (softcover) | ISBN 9781771964579 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Kociejowski, Marius. |

LCSH: Kociejowski, MariusChildhood and youth. | LCSH: Booksellers and booksellingEnglandBiography. | LCSH: Booksellers and booksellingEnglandLondon. | LCSH: Book industries and tradeEmployeesBiography. | LCSH: Book industries and tradeEnglandLondon. | CSH: Authors, Canadian (English)Biography. | LCGFT: Autobiographies.

Classification: LCC Z280 .K63 2022 | DDC 381/.45002092dc23

Edited by Daniel Wells

Copyedited by Chandra Wohleber

Text and cover designed by Michel Vrana

Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country, and the financial support of the Government of Canada. Biblioasis also acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council (OAC), an agency of the Government of Ontario, which last year funded 1,709 individual artists and 1,078 organizations in 204 communities across Ontario, for a total of $52.1 million, and the contribution of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and Ontario Creates.

for Dan Wells

to do with as he likes

A shadow moves across my plate. When it reaches full eclipse, which will be in a few months time, I will be out of the antiquarian book trade forever. Try as I might, I cant rinse the rancid taste of that word out of my mouth. What is forever when set against the universe? Its about the length of a sticking plaster. And that we should think ourselves indispensable. A necessary illusion, without it wed surely lose our will to live. We seek, in whatever small way, to be recognised for what we achieve. The shop in Cecil Court, where I have worked for over a decade, will be closing although its proprietor, Peter Ellis, will continue to operate from home. I wish him well but, and Im sure he will agree with me, 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.

The world was made, says Stphane Mallarm, in order to result in a beautiful book. All elsethe filling of an order, the cataloguing of a bookis mere procedure. A computer screen will take us further away from, not closer to, the Eleusinian mysteries. Anyway I thank Peter Ellis for the best years of my working life. Ive had fewer problems with him than with anyone else. This may seem like a backhanded compliment, which it isnt. Ive had my share of trouble. Ive seen discord: Ive seen one man take his own business and cheat it, lie to it, bleed it into tulip-shaped glasses, starve it to death over Michelin-starred dishes; Ive seen a man whose mind dissolved at the bottom of a vodka bottle; Ive seen another descend into madness. A grumbler Peter may be, quick to anger too, but compared to them, he has been straight as a die. Maybe its because the book trade is so fragileso susceptible to the worlds turbulence, and to the vicissitudes of what is or is not in fashionthat it is so often an intemperate zone. This said, Ive been lucky enough to be close to what I love. And yet what we love can bring out not only the best but also the worst in ourselves. When the day arrives, and the final turning of the key in the front door lock sounds louder than its ever done before, itll be all I can do to keep a stoic face. It is not so much a job Ill be leaving as a way of life.

I am not, in the fullest sense, a bookseller, which is to say an independent one, although the opportunities for me to become one did arise. The choice was between selling books and writing them. One would not allow for the other; put it down to some configuration in the brain. I am not so sure I can consider myself a bookshop assistant either and maybe this is because I am deluded enough to believe that a man clutching a rare volume is somehow, if only for seconds at a time, bestowed with a pedigree. It is not how one feels holding a box of cereal. It might be said one can sell them both. The book world is, however, a world in which one might keep ones face. There are less dignified ways to survive, some of them so ghastly the world of the bookseller is by comparison effete. I am, by choice, maybe temperament too, a factotum in the book trade. The tough business end of things has been for others to administrate. I envy them not. I have a phobia for window envelopes. Columns with numbers in them terrify me. Amazingly, over a passage of forty-five years, I have got away with being close to innumerate, which is something of an achievement in a world of sales. I can translate Roman numerals into Arabic, however, and I know which way up a book sits in the hand and on a good day I can even alphabetize. What more can anyone want to ask of me? I have always been at the service of other people, which, for those wanting a satellite reading of where I stand, is the position from whence these words come, the ticklish underbelly of the trade.

I have been invited to write a memoir of my working life from a crouching angle and not from some elevated placethe factotum as watcher, spook, chronicler of the mundane. I resisted, I pleaded. I said I would rather not produce a sedative. Many such books are. The dedicatee of this book, who may be its only readerif so, its plenty enough for meafter over half a decade of petitioning has finally worn me down. This book is his to do with as he likes.

So what am I to say of it all? What should my approach be? What at first I figured would be a breeze now weighs heavily on me. Can I remember anything or, more to the point, is what I remember reliable? We fabricate our own lives, which is not to say we falsify them, but that with respect to the present the past is always shaped by it, its the mould in which the jellys made. There again, I know things nobody else does, and so that raises the question of how much I should divulge of a world reputed for its tetchiness. The book trade is naturally secretive even when it pretends otherwise. What one might think is an open book is actually a closed one. The reason is simple: one does not want to reveal the identities of ones sources, ones customers or where the next big buy will be. As gossip is the bastard child of secrecy theres no end to the wagging of tongues. Ive never known a bookseller whose ears do not perk up at news of a close neighbours infelicities. Maybe its because he knows he might be next in line. And yet try and get him to speak into a microphone hell send you on a wild goose chase. The bookseller is a master of deflection. So Im largely on my own with this one. I dont want to get bogged down in shop talk or matters of points and issues or auction rings or a thousand other things that seem to fascinate other booksellers because they bore me silly and if the writer is bored chances are he will bore. Therell be no yeast in the prose.