Bookshop Staff Profile: Holly Smith

Published in the 2011 Summer Newsletter.
Some notes on my relationship with books.

In eighth grade our teacher asked: Where do you picture yourself in 10 years?
My answer was: surrounded by books.
Here’s what I buy: food and books.
I’m still recovering from a compulsive book-buying habit.
While in school, I often found myself with stacks of new books atop my bookcase and on my bedside table, even though I knew I was too busy with schoolwork to read anything with a title like Contingency, Hegemony, and Universality or The Visual Culture Reader.
After graduating, I tended to go the Literary Guillotine at the beginning of every quarter, just to see what my favorite professors were having their students read. Or so I told myself.
I confess, my shelf of favorite books includes titles that I haven’t actually read (Waugh’s Scoop), or have read only half of (Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor), or that I wouldn’t exactly say I “loved” (Borges’ Labyrinths) but whose palate and design complement the ones I have.
It may in fact be a shelf of favorite publishers. I once organized my entire library by publisher.
Sexiest publisher: Duke UP.
In middle school, I struggled with whether or not to buy Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonflight because of the acrid smell of the cheap ink and paper.
When I smell that odor now, I am transported back to the science fiction aisle of the Fisherman’s Wharf Barnes & Noble, performing olfactory tests on the mass markets.
I passed up a lot of good books because of that scent.
My house in college had a huge roof that we all climbed out on to study and sunbathe on hot days. The pages of my texts were always so blindingly bright that I could not read them without sunglasses. The words seemed to cast almost-imperceptible shadows on the paper.
In the warmer months, the smell of McHenry Library leaks through its cold, concrete walls and into the surrounding redwood forest.
I struggle with the idea of deforestation.
I can never bring the right number of books on a trip. When I have them, I don’t read them, and when I don’t have them, I need them. It’s a game we play, my books and I.
The state of my apartment: two books on the bedside table; three on the floor next to the bed; three on the kitchen table; two on my desk; one in my bag. All active in one way or another.
If my bookshelves were empty, my life would be only half full.

Holly can be found most days working in our children’s book section or behind the counter as a used books buyer.