In a tribute for Lori Ellison, an artist and bookseller who died August 1, Karen Lillis, a fellow artist and former bookseller at St. Mark's Bookshop, noted that Ellison was "congenitally a bookstore person" who aimed to work at every independent bookstore in New York City.
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| Lori Ellison (photo: anaba.blogspot.com) |
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Writes Lillis: "The first thing to know about this is that working in a bookstore is like being paid to be yourself. You are an avid reader, you have many interests, the interests go into and come out of reading books, and someone pays you to interact with other readers without submerging who you are. There are some tasks you're getting wages for, but you don't have to shoe-horn yourself into some other persona during your work day in order to accomplish them. Your bosses and your coworkers celebrate your interests, or at least the fact that you have interests. In this sense, it goes very well with a life of expression. The difficult thing is making it on a bookstore clerk's salary, which can be half of what the average office worker takes home. Bookstore people don't necessarily like the salary but generally would rather be themselves all day and will sacrifice much to remain employed in the book world.
"I remember associating Lori, for a long time, with her job at Hacker Art Books, a renowned fifth floor bookstore on 57th Street. Seymour Hacker had one of the largest collections of art books in the world and specialized in antiquarian books and rare finds. He had been raised as a bookseller on New York's famed Book Row, and that put his employees in a higher category of bookstore clerk in my mind: 'old school,' 'knows her [stuff].' After Hacker, Lori worked at Posman's Books off Washington Square Park. Posman's was a well-regarded general retail bookstore with a strong philosophy selection. They weren't as punk-Marxist as St. Mark's Bookshop but catered to a more academic side of the NYU crowd. Later Lori followed one of her Posman coworkers to Labyrinth, a serious bookshop up near Columbia that predated Book Culture. At some point she had worked at the notorious Gotham Book Mart uptown, at the always-hiring Strand Bookstore near Union Square, and at Pageant Books (formerly of Book Row) on West Houston–as well as independent bookstores in Richmond and Austin. Back on Bedford Avenue, it was common for me to find her thumbing through design monographs at Spoonbill & Sugartown or checking out Eastern Philosophy titles across the street at Clovis Press."