Working at a bookstore

Man do I have a lot of memories of working at 57th Street Books. I guess I'm just going to dive in with some things you can expect if you work at a bookstore.

1. You'll meet the best book people. If you're a book person, working at a bookstore is going to have a fair few perks, one of which is working with other book people. Now, they may like very different genres than you, but you can still have amazing discussions about books with them. One of my favorite memories from working at a bookstore was sitting down with the children's manager and us going through the children's section and the history sections (which I tried to curate). I got answers to some questions that had haunted me as a bookseller ("My child is a very advanced reader, so I want to give her a book that's challenging, but doesn't have any mature content. What would you recommend?" "What's a good realistic fiction YA novel?") as well as just got to hear about what she thought made a good children's book and who some of her favorite authors and illustrators were. I then got to talk about what I thought made a good history book (a sense of humor is good, narrative format is usually best, and reigning in of unnecessary information is a huge, but rare, plus). You'll also make friends with your coworkers and maybe even some regular customers and book people are pretty much always game for a great conversation about what you're reading.
2. You'll get excited about reading. Now, if you're a book person like me, maybe you never struggled with this. But as someone who had to read a lot in undergrad, I lost some of my reading for pleasure drive. For my history classes I was already reading the equivalent of a book a week and my brain needed time to rest, so when exactly was I going to read for fun? Usually I did this over the summer, but that's still a pretty limited amount of time and I was working and/or interning during the summer so it wasn't like I didn't have the need to let my brain rest then. But being literally surrounded by books and book people gets you really into reading again. Even just shelving books you'll see so many that you'll want to read and then customers will tell you why they're buying the book they're buying and your coworkers will tell you what books are going to be coming out in their sections soon. It's just all very exciting.
3. You'll develop a habit of knowing what books are coming out and what books are hitting it big. I curated the history sections (to the best of my ability) at 57th Street Books and so I invested time in researching what cool new history books were coming out that I thought would work well for the store. It gets very exciting, but sometimes frustrating when a book is announced waaayy before it comes out (I got excited for Marlon James's book Black Leopard, Red Wolf years ago, before it even had a title). 
4. You'll develop an irrepressible habit of telling people about a book your store has. I really can't count the times my friends were talking about something and I chimed in with, "We have a book about that." Mostly I think they weren't annoyed, but it is a habit you'll have to control because "We have a book about that" is sometimes not an appropriate response and it is often beside the point. You'll learn to live with it though.
5. You'll have to deal with weird people. Okay, so mostly I've talked about perks, but customer service always means you're gonna have to deal with odd people. I had someone tell me they were shopping for their stoner stepson who didn't do anything and didn't like to read, but they wanted to buy him a book. Awkward (although I did end up selling her a book about pot sooooo...win?). I had another person announce to me that he wanted to buy a baby book because he found out he was a grandfather that day, but that it wasn't because the grandchild had just been born. No, no, it was because someone had accidentally told him, against his son's wishes, that a grandchild had been born. I kept my advice of "Your son doesn't want a book from you" to myself and just pointed at the board books. There was also the customer who kept buying Clifford books and wanted to creepily learn my schedule (although he said he wasn't trying to learn my schedule after he asked what it was...real sly, my dude, I'm totally fooled). And, if you're a woman, sorry to say it but you're gonna have to deal with guys looking at you uncomfortably and maybe trying to touch you when really it's not appropriate. Hopefully your coworkers will help you with all of that though.

(Prompt by Kimisha Cassidy)