I've been here ten years.  Okay... not ten years... nine years, eleven months and about thirty-six hours.  In that time, 21,411 people have come to the BSB professing the unbridled desire to be booksellers.  They come from the corners of the country, from the cities and the farms - 28,446 of them in ten years - with the burning desire to be booksellers.  We see them here every day; they drive to the BSB with all they own in hundred dollar cars, with their hopes and dreams rattling around in a brown paper keyboard.  The faces are new each day, but the stories are always the same - 33,508 stories - all different, but all the same.  Cowboys, drunks, Christians, Catholic and squirrels - 36,988 of them - all wanting the same thing.

In those ten years - of those nearly 41,000 posters, only two have become booksellers - Melanie and lyceumdreams (whose name we still don't know, despire his having been here 24 hours a day for several decades).  Two, out of more than fifty thousand.  We are abject failures.

I don't sell thousand-dollar+ books, but I post here and I'm NOT a failure.

Do you realize how many people you have offended?

Thanks for everything you have given over the years to the board, Joe.  You are a treasure.

I'm gonna take my hundred dollar car and exit.

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Kate - reread the post, please.  You didn't come here with that unstoppable urge to be a bookseller - you came here as a bookseller wanting to improve your abilities - and stayed to help others along the way.  This isn't about whether we, collectively, have helped others sharpen their bookselling tools - it's simply about the fact that so many people come here wanting to learn from scratch, just because they "love books" - and disappear as quickly as they appear, like some scene from a poorly-produced staging of Faust.

Do we collectively act as a whetstone for booksellers who come to the Board?  Absolutely... but as firestarters, we stink out loud.

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So what?

Every year, thousands of people express their burning desire to become actors, but they don't have the discipline or the intelligence to do it.  They see what they think is the glamour.  Or they played one of the the shepherds in the 4th grade Christmas pageant and loved the attention they got when they mugged to the audience.  Or they've always had a crush on Ken Branagh or Emma Thompson.  Or they want to hear someone say, "Oh!  With your looks, you'd be wonderful!"  Or... I could go on and on.  Their "burning desire" is merely a sunburn -- skin deep, no deeper, and fading fast.

And it's the same for most of the people you're talking about who come here.

I am glad to see you backed off and granted that Kate and many others who post here are successful booksellers and worthy ones.  Otherwise, I would have to have smacked you.  Either that, or showed the squirrels that bit of loose siding that provides direct access to your attic.

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maxine*j wrote:

I am glad to see you backed off and granted that Kate and many others who post here are successful booksellers and worthy ones.

I didn't "back off" in the least.  Lots of people here are successful booksellers - but only two of them weren't booksellers to begin with, having come here yearning to be (God knows why) booksellers.

maxine*j wrote:

Otherwise, I would have to have smacked you.  Either that, or showed the squirrels that bit of loose siding that provides direct access to your attic.

Stone houses don't suffer from "loose siding," and the one squirrel in residence would never allow another little nut-scrounger within 12 parsecs of the place.

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D'ja ever figger that over the years many have posted repeatedly under assorted noms de plums so as  to periodically enjoy the warmth of your attention, to milk the depths of your amazingly cyclopedic knowledge,  to read what you have writ so well, and to chortle along with yer subtile cleverness?

Not that I've ever dun secha thing, but it's bin tempting.

I continue to hope that yer notes and scribbles here and elsewhere are being saved and will someday appear in a book of yer own makin'.

Here's to ya!!

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You may not count me since I don't sell high end books but I DID come here as someone who wanted to be a bookseller (a lifelong desire not yet expressed) and learned how from this board and have a small satisfying bookselling business.

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Cibola and Keziak - I assumed you were both already booksellers when you arrived here.  Bookselling is bookselling - it's not what a bookseller sells, but how they sell that turns the tide.

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Count me in as one who truly and deeply appreciates the lessons being taught here. I eke out a living selling used books, but the real reason I stick with books is because I love reading and handling them. It's innate in me. For whatever reasons I never went throught the traditional routes of school and college, but if there is one gift I gained from those who put my first book in my grubby little paws it is the love for the printed word.

So, ultimately, if you love what you're doing, it is never failure.

We are abject failures.

Not at all ... the BSB is the equivalent of literary boot camp.

Those 65,000+ desertions simply got tired of hearing, "THE COPYRIGHT DATE MEANS NOTHING!!!!!!!!"

Does anyone have the code for a smiley face holding their hands over their mouth shaking no, no?

lol

lux-et-umbra wrote:

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For what it's worth...

I've become a bookseller by (inter multa alia) watching

what Joe does,

not what he says ...

(and, believe it or not, while I was busy learning, I don't think I even knew that this board existed).

Okay... now I'm a a conceited arrogant egocentric.

Mark - I'm speechless.

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When I started reading and posting on the BSB I was a newbie.  I was too ignorant to even know how ignorant I was. The only thing I had going for me was that I used to be a journalist and so I knew how to put a sentence together.  I think the generous souls on the BSB made me into a bookseller.  So I dunno Joe, but I might be third on your list.

I let a couple of trolls chase me away from here, which was probably cowardly but I had more than enough stress on my plate at the time.  I have checked back from time to time in a lurkish sort of way, though, so I continue to learn.