Bookshop Staff Profile: Kat Bailey

Published in the 2011 Winter Newsletter

I cannot talk myself out of buying a book. I am not a big impulse buyer; I don’t care about shoes, I have no great desire for gadgets, and I could probably eat nothing but cereal for a week if I had to. Books are my thing. When I enter a bookstore, every shred of willpower disappears. It doesn’t matter how many stacks of unread books wait for me at home, or that the book will be out in paperback in a year, or that I might even be able to borrow a copy from a friend. Those arguments never work on me. I can’t help it. I love to own books. Sometimes I think that I need to own books.

A couple of years ago, I decided to stop policing my buying habits. I buy some books knowing they will be read over the weekend, and some books knowing they will sit on a shelf for awhile, but that somewhere down the line, I will love them again. I recently came upon a quote about owning books that reached out and poked me right in the heart: “He should live with more books than he reads, with a penumbra of unread pages, of which he knows the general character and content, fluttering round him.” —John Maynard Keynes. I don’t know very much about Keynes, but I do believe that he and I would get along just splendidly.

My mother is an English teacher, and it is from her that I inherited the habit of stacking books next to my bed. She is also the one who taught me the importance of independent bookstores. Growing up, I used to visit Book Passage in Corte Madera with her on weekends, and one Saturday we arrived and found hundreds of people waiting to hear Hillary Clinton read from her autobiography. I remember being impressed that a bookstore could be such a hotbed, and vaguely proud that one of the most important women in the world was in my bookstore. I still feel these things when I step into a bookstore: awed, proud, and welcomed. I suppose, in a way, that I am slowly trying to turn my home into my own bookstore, one where I can eat and sleep and browse amongst more books than I know what to do with. It’s a good life.

You can find Kat behind the used book counter, hosting author events or tending to her beloved fiction section.