Free The Bookman's Promise by John Dunning

want to leave it there, but there it sat, spreading its discontent. I didn’t want to go home. I didn’t want to call a friend, catch a movie, do a crossword puzzle. I sure as hell didn’t want to sit in a bar full of strangers as an alternative to Erin d’Angelo’s luminous presence. When all else fails I usually work on books, but that night I didn’t want to do that, either.
    In fact, I didn’t know what I wanted. I seemed to have reached a major turning point in my life as a bookman. I look back at that time as my true watershed, more significant than even the half-blind leap that had brought me straight into the trade from homicide. Today I believe I was shaped by that entire half year. Even then I sensed that I was moving from my common retail base into something new, yet for most of my waking hours I had doubts that I would ever get anywhere. This must be what a writer goes through when he’s groping his way into a book. I think it was Doctorow who said that about the writing process—it’s like driving a car across country at night and all you can ever see is what’s immediately in your headlights, but you can make the whole journey that way. Maybe the book trade was like that. I had always been a slow learner, but already there had been wondrous moments when suddenly I
understood
, after months of plodding, some tiny piece of the enormous world I had come to.
A-ha! A hit of knowledge
! A leap of faith so striking that it sometimes took my breath away.
    This was never greater than in those two weeks of 1987. I had bought the Burton, which I now know was the catalyst. Millie, my gal Friday, was off on vacation and I had been forced into the annoying business of minding the store. Richard Burton had fired me up and old Mrs. Gallant had stirred me up, but on a conscious level all I had was the annoying hunch that I might work till dawn; that, and how I’d explain to Dean why I’d lied to him, when I called him tomorrow.
    My working domain was normally the back room, but in my solitude I wanted to be where I could at least see the lights of the street. I brought up my stuff and sat at the counter, but I couldn’t get my mind into it. I stared at my reference books and for a long time I just sat there and waited for my mood to change.
    The book world was very different then. In 1987 it was real work to research even simple book problems. We were still in the earliest days of the Internet: the vast, sweeping changes that have come over us had barely begun, and none of us knew how crazy it would get. Points and values on unfamiliar books still had to be searched out the old way, in bibliographies and specialists’ catalogs, and with some, you finally had to go on a gut feeling. Knowledge was rewarded by the system: you put out your books, took your chances, and if another bookseller knew more than you did, he scored on your mistake. Today any unwashed nitwit can look into a computer and pull out a price. Whether the price is proper, whether it’s even the same edition—these questions, once of major importance, have begun to pale as bookscouts and flea markets and even junk shops rush onto the Internet to play bookseller. They love to say things like “The Internet has equalized the playing field,” but all they do is cannibalize the other fellow’s off-the-wall prices for books of dubious lineage and worth. They want to play without paying any dues, now or ever. They have no reference books to back up their assertions and they’d never pay more than pocket change for anything. They wheel and deal but they care about nothing but price. The computer may have leveled the playing field in one sense—it’s a great device for revealing what people around the world are asking and paying for certain books—but in this year of grace it will not tell you, reliably, how to identify a true American first of
One Hundred Years of Solitude
.
    In those early Internet years I posted an epigram over my desk:
A book is