I'd be willing to bet that you don't know
a lot of used booksellers whose clean-
ing ladies are members of the Order
of Canada. Well, mine is. She went up
to Ottawa a few years ago, where our
Governor General pinned it on her. Her
name is Linda McKnight (my cleaning
lady, that is, not the Governor General),
and before she became the cleaning
lady at David Mason Books she was a
literary agent for about thirty years, and
before that an editor, editor-in-chief,
and then the president of McClelland
& Stewart, then Canada's most presti-
gious publisher. The closest analogy I
can come up with was an American col-
league of mine who often boasted that
his was the only shipper in the book
trade who owned a copy of the first edi-
tion of Darwin's Origin of Species (today
a $150,000-plus book, but then only
worth around $35,000 or so).

Linda is an old friend, but I was still
surprised when she phoned one day
to say she was retiring and wanted to
volunteer with me. She didn't mention
that she intended to be our clean-
ing lady. That came later. After she'd
been here a bit and had settled in with
her own desk, I began to search for
neglected but important areas in the
shop that she could handle without too
much training, thereby freeing the rest of us to make some money. That's when I began to learn about Linda's style. She didn't take well to instruction. Whenever I gently tried to tell her how
things should be done she would retort, "That's not how we did it in publishing."

"But Linda, you're not in publishing anymore. This is an antiquarian bookshop."

"I don't care, it's dumb."

One day I suggested she might find it fun to try and learn to do some minor repairs on books, something we do regularly to keep defects from getting worse and to make the books look prettier. I
learned to do these simple but important restorations when I worked for the pope, and have saved many books in the intervening years.

"I'm not doing any of that," said Linda. She often talks like this to me. I was about to ask her if there was anything that she would like to do, when she said, loudly and aggressively, "I'm the cleaning lady around here. I'm not interested in all that literary crap." After assuming her cleaning responsibilities, she was appointed head of the ephemera department, which she quickly organized. She soon grew bored, however, because she never had anyone come in as a potential client. She didn't get a lot of action, and she didn't like it when, after all her organizing, no one seemed to care. Then one day she made her first sale, and a pretty good one too. She stopped saying we should just give it all away after that. By this time she had relaxed enough to voice her opinions on many things, which were usually direct and blunt.

Linda's always tidying and straightening the displays of ephemera, books, and prints. She's also started looking around for other messes to clean up. We have to go up the hall now to wash dishes. Once, there was a small pile waiting. She saw it, then looked dangerously at me. I tried to explain that I was the company dishwasher and would be doing them soon. Five minutes later they were done, after which she spent a while glaring at me without saying anything.

The next problem she decided to tackle was me, as the main obstacle to the sense of order which she thinks proper to a bookstore. She started asking questions about what things were and why they were where they were. She soon decided that the store was incompetently arranged, and that I was
the one responsible for what she considered offensive chaos. That's when she started pushing me around.

Linda pushes me around a lot. She seems to enjoy it. I thought of asking (very meekly) if she did it to everyone, but then I noticed that she gets on wonderfully with everyone else, so I didn't.
Later, I thought I'd like to ask her if that's why she went from being a president to an agent, because I knew that's what agents do: they push publishers around so their writer clients can get rich. But by then I was apprehensive about what might happen, so instead I went back to my dishwashing.

As a cleaning lady, Linda doesn't work all that quickly, possibly because of all the time she devotes to pushing me around. I was hoping it might diminish some when we finished our recent downsizing move, which was very stressful but is now largely accomplished. The stress was largely due to me having to somehow dispose of half my store. Not an easy task for a man who spent fifty years working on the principle that buying books would save his life and provide for his old age, as a sort of insurance and pension all in one. Linda's solution for the books and furniture during the move was simply "Get rid of it!" Into the garbage or off to storage became her solution for everything.

Recently, I acquired a bumper sticker created by some genius which perfectly encapsulates the philosophy I've used during my entire so-called career. I affixed it to a wall in the store, instead of to my car, based on the belief that those driving behind me might not get the point, whereas the kinds of people who come into my store will surely understand the philosophy behind it. It reads, "THE ONE WHO DIES WITH THE MOST BOOKS WINS." A wonderful slogan. Since I've always worked on that principle, this demonstrates why I had so much stress with the downsizing. That stress was multiplied ten-fold by my cleaning lady, Linda McKnight, CM. The main thrust of her book philosophy is, and I quote, "Dump it. Out with it." She says that a lot.

Pointing at a closed banker's box, she'd say "What's that?"

"It's books. Or ephemera."

"Get rid of it. We have to get rid of this junk."

"Linda," I would explain (meekly), "I do want to get rid of it, that's why I bought it. I'm a bookseller. I plan to sell it."

"And that pile of old magazines, those boxes of old sheet music, what about them?"

"Well, they're for sale too. That's what we try to do here. Buy these things and sell them and make a living. You should like magazines and sheet music, they don't take up as much space."

"You haven't sold a bloody one of them since I've been here, not one. Get rid of it. It's all crap."

"But Linda, those things are valuable. That's why I bought them. We're going to do very well with them eventually. It just takes time."

"We need to get rid of all this stuff now. If you won't throw it out, take it to storage."

That became the next mantra, "Take it to storage, we need to get it out of here."

"But Linda (even more meekly), if it's in storage we can't sell it."

"They won't buy it anyway. It's just junk. You're a hoarder-you need help and I'm here to provide it. I've seen people like you on television." The fact that Debra Dearlove, and all the other staff wholeheartedly agreed, supporting General McKnight, CM, with great enthusiasm, didn't make it easier. "I've trained myself for fifty years to recognize gold amongst the chaff and now you all want me to get rid of it." Basking in Linda Mc Knight, CM's shadow, the staff became unruly, openly challenging my vision. During the downsize I had to solve a hundred problems of disposal every day, while constantly harassed on all flanks. Only my deep convictions of the value of my artifacts kept some slight balance while I rescued what I could.

I finished by the deadline but had to sacrifice quite a few wonderful books which will one day be extremely valuable and which Debra Dearlove will certainly lose thousands of dollars on. Well, I warned her. Others will profit from my foresight, and it will serve her right.

But at least the pressure of deadlines is off, although not without a certain amount of suffering. Our storage is jammed. There are unsightly boxes and pictures around the store, but I'm hoping to sort at my pace now. And don't think I've won anything. My esteemed cleaning lady, Linda McKnight, CM, has begun her next campaign.

"Next is that desk of yours. It's disgusting, papers everywhere, with rotting fruit underneath it. Books everywhere, no order, you can't find anything. No sane person could work there. Next week we're starting on it. Out with it all, we're getting rid of it. It's all crap."

This is not how I'd envisioned my golden years.


-David Mason