By Harriet Bartle
Have you ever wondered what it’s like to sell books? I used to; I’d worked in retail for three years before I became a bookseller and as such I knew the ropes of customer service. I thought that it might be different, though; almost a romantic sort of job, where you spend your days surrounded by books of all genres, chatting to the quiet customers as they wander in out of the cold and expect to find fellow book lovers carefully shelving new stock and listening to peaceful, interesting music. As a literature student, it became the ideal prospect, the dream job; when I was lucky enough to be presented with the opportunity to enter the group of people that can call themselves booksellers, I jumped into this new world of pages head first. I was eager to see how this fascinating industry worked, particularly in the new era of internet shopping.