In the hallowed halls of bookstores

ON THE EVE of my 40th birthday, I find myself doing exactly what I always resented in my elders. I’ve begun to give unsolicited advice to young people and romanticize my own youth. Somebody stop me.

Although I’ve been blessed with a terrible memory, odd incidents and news events can sometimes trigger the recovery of lost data from my not-so-glorious youth. In hindsight, it doesn’t seem so dreadful.

Last week, the news that Cody’s Books on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley is closing brought up a boatload of repressed memories. For days now I’ve been piecing together the story of my unsentimental education, and I’m wondering what would have become of me had I never known the bookstores of Telegraph Avenue.

I started disliking school in the first grade. That was the year Mrs. Casperson sent me to the principal’s office for writing a poem. No, she didn’t send me there to have me punished -- in fact the principal patted me on the head -- but I didn’t know that on my excruciating, forced march to her office. From then on, I knew that school and I would never be close.

When I was a boy, my bookish father took me on trips to the undergraduate research library and the bookstore at UCLA. Every fall before school started he’d buy me a dark-blue vinyl binder with UCLA written in gold cursive letters in the lower right-hand corner. I think that’s when I realized that although school was a bummer, bookstores were pretty cool.

By my first year of college, I had no idea I wanted to be a writer. But what I did know is that if I had to work, I preferred to do it around books and newspapers. For the next four years -- all right, it took me five to graduate -- I held a series of jobs that allowed me to traffic in the printed word without actually having to write.

It was in these stores, rather than in classrooms, that I received my real college education.

Cody’s wasn’t my favorite Berkeley bookstore. But it definitely had the most cachet of any book vendor on the south side of campus. At the time, they didn’t hire lowly undergraduates as booksellers. So I was ecstatic when I scored a job opening book boxes in the backroom. The pay wasn’t so hot, and I found the co-workers kind of grouchy in an overly educated and underemployed sort of way. But the best things about the gig were the employee discount and the chance to peruse the merchandise while on the clock. It also didn’t hurt that I lived across the street.

Though I was fortunate not to have to work 30 hours a week to pay the bills, I did it anyway. Given my long-standing disdain for school, I preferred to spend my days and nights on Telegraph Avenue rather than on campus. The reward came in the form of books and more books. Though I confess to not always reading the books my professors assigned, you can bet that I completed the selections that I brought home from work, books like Hemingway’s “A Moveable Feast,” Simone Weil’s “Gravity and Grace” and Paul Auster’s collection of 20th century French poetry. I appreciated them more in part because I discovered them on my own.

In addition to Cody’s, I also had jobs opening boxes at Moe’s, the wonderful used-book store next door and, for a short spell, in the Judaica section at Doe Memorial Library on campus. My favorite college jobs came when I graduated to dealing with the customers. At University Press Books on Bancroft Avenue, I sold a copy of a Dostoyevsky biography to Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz. I was star struck by the old man with the bushy eyebrows and the Greek fisherman’s cap.

Unlike on campus, where everything was hierarchical, I felt that bookstores and newsstands allowed me to interact more freely with the luminaries -- whether in print or in the flesh -- whom I held in such high esteem. I was free of the intermediaries of university and professor. While working at Dave’s Smoke Shop, the newsstand on Durant Avenue, I sold newspapers to novelist Ishmael Reed and magazines to political activist Daniel Ellsberg. Professors who could be so unreachable up the hill would come in excited to find their own bylines and quotes in this French weekly or that Italian newspaper. In essence, my time behind the counter in Berkeley demythologized learning and made me a firm believer in one’s ability to decipher the scriptures without the aid of the priests.

Of course, libraries -- where books are loaned for free -- are the single most democratic form of higher education. But bookstores are not far behind. The demise of Cody’s Books doesn’t bode well for my college town or for my alma mater, because education is much too important a matter to leave to the professionals.