A professional bookseller buys and sells properties, much like a publisher or the procuress in Vermeer’s great painting below.  It is work, money exchanges hands, people are rewarded by buying and selling.  It takes knowledge, judgment, skill, time, caring, and an ability to manage money.  Some do it for a short time, some long.  Sometimes it adds up to something riveting, as this month at UPB:

Note the heads in this image of the audience listening to the man half-hidden on the right on November 29, 2011 during a  UPB Conversation with Brandi Catanese on her book The Problem of the Color(blind): Racial Transgression and the Politics of Black Performance published by Michigan.    William McClung

I’ve had some blowback on my preoccupation with this question. Barnes says “don’t be patronizing/manupulating,” Creveling says “of course it is,”  Lopez and Sutton say, “sure, but we don’t need this,” and Karen says “get over it, this is getting tiresome.”

Maybe Metier — as Callenbach and Bensky have suggested — is a better word: métier . . . .a trade, profession, or occupation : those who work honestly at their métier.• an occupation or activity that one is good at : she decided that her real métier was grand opera.• an outstanding or advantageous characteristic : subtlety is not his métier. ORIGIN late 18th cent.: French, based on Latin ministerium ‘service.’  Oxford American Dictionary

That’s about work and money, of course, but there is more than that in this.

It is also about beauty, intense interest, carefulness, and art.  Take a look at Vermeer’s marvelous painting of The Procuress below.  At our our best, I think that is what we are about, too — buying and selling, beautiful presentations, intense interest and value, social pleasures.          William McClung

My old publishing buddies — Stanley Holowitz, Ernest Callenbach, Czeslaw Jan Grycz, Grant Barnes, and I — have been talking about professionialism and whether the honorific and challenge can be rightly applied to bookselling, particularly  at UPB/Berkeley.

Callenbach in his thoughtful way writes:

“A sense of professionalism always, I think, involves some kind of community of colleagues—who influence, educate, and sometimes discipline each other. It is not a matter of certification, or even accumulation of an agreed canon of knowledge, but a social process. And so it thrives in societies where merit is appreciated more than connections, where hard work is respected no matter its mental or physical  aspects, and where a significant public recognizes the deserved reputations of the professionals.

“But I actually like better the French concept of metier, which can include bakers, street-sweepers, laundresses, waiters, taxi-drivers, and certainly book-sellers on any level: anyone who does a job with maximum finesse, sensitivity, perfection, for all to see. . . .”

The challenging work of selecting and selling serious  books to intellectuals awash in alternatives has, I maintain, potentially all those characteristics, much like publishing itself.   I want my dermatologist to be a professional in every way, though what he does every six months is tediously (for him) look at the pre-cancerous spots on my face and shoulders and then zap them with liquid nitrogen.  Part of professionalism is to do work, over and over again, that is repetitive for you, but highly important for each recipient.  And there is a great deal of knowledge, skill, and care in doing so well.  William McClung