Moe’s Books on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley has four floors, approximately 250,000 used and new books, and one clerk who can find any single one of them faster than the catalog computer can. Her name is Phyllis Karam. She is 58. She has worked at Moe’s since 2007.
She does not consult the computer. The store has a catalog system; Phyllis used it for the first year and a half. She stopped using it in the spring of 2008. She has not used it since.
Her method, she says, is not memory. It is geography. She knows the building. She walks the stacks twice a day, on a route that takes her about 40 minutes. She notes any new acquisitions, any sold books from the day before, any reshelving she or another clerk has done. She walks slowly, with one hand on the spines.
“A bookstore is not a library,” she says. “The catalog is a courtesy, not a system. The system is me.”
She has been wrong eleven times in seventeen years. Each wrong time is recorded, with the date and the book, in a small ledger on her desk. She does this so she knows what she has gotten wrong; she does not want to forget her mistakes.
Customers ask her for everything from contemporary fiction (“Where is the new Ishiguro?”) to obscure scholarship (“A second-edition Dover Strunk and White, hardback, 1959 printing?”). She walks them, in person, to the shelf. She does not point. She walks. She says pointing is for clerks who do not know.
She came to the Bay Area from Beirut in 1989 with her sister, both refugees of the Lebanese civil war. She has a master’s in comparative literature from Berkeley that she earned in night classes between 1992 and 1997. She has been writing a book of her own for fifteen years on the relationship between civil-war memory and exile poetry. She has 312 pages. She says it is mostly done.
On a Saturday afternoon Moe’s gets between 400 and 700 walk-in customers. Phyllis answers, on average, 70 location questions per shift. The store estimates she saves them about $90,000 a year in time, computer training, and avoided returns. They have offered her a manager title four times. She has refused each time. The floor, she says, is where the books are.
On the Saturday I visited, she was asked for a particular 1981 Cambridge edition of Wittgenstein’s “On Certainty.” She walked the customer to the second floor philosophy section, third stack from the back, fourth shelf from the bottom, sixteen books in from the left. The book was there. The customer paid $11. Phyllis went back to her route. She had a Lorca biography to find next.
