Bookshop Memories by George Orwell

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                   Bookshop Memories 
                                             -George Orwell

Bookshop Memories is written by George Orwell in the year 1936. In this essay he shares his experience working as an assistant in a second-hand bookshop.

 Orwell begins the essay by breaking down the fantasy of second-hand bookstore as a "paradise where charming old gentlemen browse eternally."  He reveals the truth concealed behind a second-hand bookshop. 

Orwell describes the nature of bookshop customers - first edition snobs, oriental students, vague minded women and "the kind of people who would be a nuisance anywhere but have special opportunities in a bookshop".

Orwell talks about two types of "pest" who "haunt" such bookshops. 
I) Decayed Person - Attempt to sell worthless books .
II) Paranoiacs - Orders large number of books but has no intention to purchase it. 

The shop had various sidelines including second - hand typewriters, stamps, horoscopes and Christmas cards. Apartf fromthis there was a lending library, "In a lending library you see people's real tastes, not their pretended ones." 

Orwell talks about the readers taste for books. Women prefered to read the works of Dell. Men read detective stories. People had no taste for the works of Dickens and Jane Austen. They had a distaste for American novels. People also resist short stories.

In conclusion, Orwell says that he would not wish to be a bookseller full-time, mainly because it is a job that tends to give one a distaste for books.

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