A bookseller’s education, concluded
“I’m a book sniffer. I never met a book that I didn’t open up and stick my face into.”
—Robert Olen Butler
My first book, From Hang Time to Prime Time: Business, Entertainment, and the Birth of the Modern-day NBA, took 16 months to report and write. In reality, the book was born almost 15 years ago. On November 15, 2006, I left my editing job and officially became a bookseller at the Borders in East Brunswick, New Jersey.
Before my trade magazine editing career began in March 2003, and swerving around kids parked in the Manga section, I wrote what I wanted. That stretch of time, which ended when the store closed in January 2008, was transformative. I wrote an essay about the experience in August 2007 called “A Bookseller’s Education,” my first piece for a major national publication.
