Oak Knoll

Featured in The New York Times article "Love the Smell of Old Books? This Bookseller Would Like You to Leave."
"In his grouchy, funny memoir, 'A Factotum in the Book Trade,' Marius Kociejowski writes about what a good bookstore should feel like, famous customers hes served and more....'A Factotum in the Book Trade' is memorable because a) its well-written, and b) its close in touch with the books." - Dwight Garner, The New York Times

Praise for Marius Kociejowski
"Kociejowski draws on all aspects of his life in these engaging, idiosyncratic personal essays . . . [that] proffer the reader equal measures of autobiography, insight and quirky charm."
- Michael Dirda, Washington Post

"[Kociejowski is] one of the most evocative travel writers to emerge in the last decade . . . He may well be peerless."
- Maclean's

"Here the charm is deep, the splendour unlaboured; the colours of history, reckoned afresh, saturate singular people, in whom passion is lucid again . . . here is one who collects his extraordinary resources, and strides."
- Christopher Middleton

"It is a testament to the power of this superb book that I felt not despondency, but . . . elation."
- Adam Thorpe, Times Literary Supplement


First edition. A fine copy.

A memoir of a life in the antiquarian book trade, A Factotum in the Book Trade is a journey between the shelves - and then behind the counter, into the overstuffed basement, and up the spine-stacked attic stairs of your favourite neighbourhood bookshop. From his childhood in rural Ontario, where at the village jumple sale he bought poetry volumes for their pebbled-leather covers alone, to his all-but-accidental entrace into the trade in London and the career it turned into, poet and travel writer Marius Kociejowski recounts his life among the buyers, sellers, customers and literary nobility - the characters, fictional and not - who populate these places we all love. Cataloging their passions and pleasures, oddities and obsessions, A Factotum in the Book Trade is a journey through their lives, and a story of the serendipities and collisions of fate, the mundate happenings and indelible encounters, the friendships, feuds, losses, and elations that characterize the business of books - and, inevitably, make up an unforgettable life.