John Wong has been a rare and antiquarian book buyer for over thirty years at the store.

Q.  How did you get your job at Moe’s?

A.  I have to thank the Music Man and my pool stick for that.  I had just finished my art history degree at Berkeley in 1974 with little chance of employment in my field.  Indeed I had taken up electronics repair at Laney college that summer so that I could repair radios and televisions in my spare time.  I was at the flea market every week looking for old stereo equipment (I had worked for the ASUC  store Igor’s Boogie Stereo Store in my freshman year at Cal) and incidentally looking for old books to sell or trade in for books useful to my art history major.  I quickly found out that Moe’s Books on Telegraph was the fairest place to bring in books so I haunted that place trying to learn what books they wanted to buy and stock. 

Trying to get a job there the normal way like asking about it got me nowhere but one day Moe was behind the counter yelling (good-naturedly) at the bookstore staff, “...there’s going to be trouble!”  Well I immediately chimed in, “Starts with a T, rhymes with P, stands for pool!”  Moe turned right around and glowered, “ What do you know about pool?”  “Well I play,” I answered and he invited me to his house to shoot pool. Well, the back of the house anyway- it was a old garage fitted with a old Brunswick table from the 40’s or 50’s.  Since much of my day at Cal Berkeley was in the campus billiard hall anyway ( a grand place then with twenty plus tables, snooker and cushion billiards, olympic size tables etc.) I was able to hold my stick (a Willie Hoppe cue with Irish linen) against Moe and was invited back numerous times and eventually hired to work in the bookstore.

There was one other Moe’s employee who was good at Billiards and that was Bruce Miller, who had a custom stick.  Bruce and I vied for the attention of Mimi Pond who was a goofy cartoony artist I met when I once gave a lecture on book illustration at California College of Arts and Crafts.  She was also a waitress at the Royal Cafe and she talked me into accompanying her to bus stations at three in the morning so she could sketch the sleeping indigent.  I got her to do a sketch of Moe with his cue once. Bruce and I were hired about the same time and were the young cubs amongst the old hands. Gene Barone hadn’t yet joined the staff.  I made myself more useful by helping Moe’s daughter Katie (or was it Doris?) with her algebra and by fixing a radio for someone Moe was dating.

The older employees made it especially tough on me in the beginning as I didn’t have any prior bookstore experience.  After watching other book buyers for days and waiting for a chance to buy books they waited until the local crazy woman came in with books to sell.  You must understand that this woman went up and down the street picking up trash with three or four foul dogs tied to her Safeway shopping cart and she never took a bath.  You could smell her coming.  Bob Baldock then the de facto manager of Moe’s said “OK John your’e up!”. (Hmmm...now that I think of it maybe he was behind that written examination that I had to pass to work in the up-and-coming rare book room.)  Other times Bob Baldock was very generous giving me books and bottles of wine which I have never forgotten.  

At night the two bookshop employees left vied for sweeping the floor as the loser had to count the money and do the till.  If we were within a few hundred dollars that was considered a bullseye.

Moe of course was the centerpiece of the store. All the employees no matter how talented were just clowns or acrobats circling the ringmaster.  Moe’s ever-present buffoonery also brought out the physical comedy in me and I would often step on his toes behind the counter and answer him in oblique puns grunts or non-sequiters. When he barked orders to the old record department down the stairs in the old location to turn the country music he hated down- they invariably turned the volume up. When things seemed to be too quiet in the new building he would accidentally (read that intentionally) throw his lit cigar into the trash bin knowing full well the smoke would set off the fire alarms , the emergency lights would go on, and all the fire doors in the stairwell on all floors would close immediately and dramatically. These were moments he lived for.

By making me work around the corner in a little storage area for Moe’s on Dwight (now Cartesian Books) he thought he could banish me from the main store so my one day stint on Saturdays became a two day workweek with Friday added then eventually the whole week.  Moe’s had decided to sell the remainder of art book stock that was gathered there for a mailed catalog of art books modeled after the catalogs issued by Ursus Books in New York which specialized in such stuff.  Every section grew bigger and by the time Moe built his new building in 1978 we moved an entire shop of art, photography and architecture books to the fourth floor.


Q.-What was the funniest thing you never said?
A.-That would be the time when a women asked us what we did with the donated books.  Currently many of them go to a books for prisoners program but back in the day they were given to the U.S.O. for serviceman or donated to schools for drop-outs or for whatever was the charity of the day.  When the woman asked us what we did with the donations, Laura Tibbals said, “We kill baby seals with them!”  [That was
really an aside of hers and not a pronouncement but the humor remains.]

Q.-What about everything you never wrote?
A.-As a joke Andrew Schelling wrote a review of a Pablo Neruda book that appeared with my name that appeared in the Chronicle. My experiences buying books are interesting but as in the case of any commercial history living people would protest or sue.  Sometimes I write things next to the price of a book for sale that would make
someone laugh I hope but to remember them would be insanity.  This is the only interview I have never done.

Q.-What about the weirdest customer you never knew?
A.-Customers who had snakes wrapped around their necks never bothered me but once we started having more women working behind the counter we did decide to not let in Rudy the impeccably dressed black man who looked up women's’ skirts via the elaborate mirrors he had glued to the tops of his shoes.

Q.-What’s the weirdest thing you never did in the bookstore?
A.-That would be the widow of a customer who interred a bone belonging to her late husband in the bookshop overlooking his favorite section which was “New Arrivals”.

Q.-What was the best job description you never had?
A.-That would be Owen who, worried about a order to not buy so many books, said  “You know we are book-buyers not book-rejectors.”

Q.-What was the worst book-buy that you never went on?
A.-Hands down it was the time two thugs came in and muttered something about selling books and Herb Bevins went with them to look at the books.  Later that afternoon we had to pick him up way out where they left him after they took his wallet.

Q.-How have you managed to re-invent yourself after all these years?
A.-Not at all.  I’m the same but the times have changed so much that I probably seem curiously refreshing by now to all those people who are looking for the same new thing.  And don’t ask me about the internet.

Q.- What about the internet?
A.-If we only didn't know now what we didn't know then we would be okay.  The internet waylaid the second-hand book business by making everything available all at once, a few books became more expensive but the vast majority of books for sale lost value making bookselling an antiquated antiquarian activity.  Bookstores can’t sell the books that were the staple of the industry - the average to moderate to higher priced books that put meat and potatoes on the dinner-plate and paid the rent.  What’s going to happen when all the bookstores go out of business? Will the on-line giant booksellers  then lose their showrooms? Big on line booksellers reap the benefits of brick and mortar booksellers whose display of books help sell a lot of books online but the same on line booksellers share none of that overhead! How many times have bookstore owners watched customers take notes about possible purchases in the shop and then watch the same customer leave the shop without purchasing a book. Older booksellers are mostly a learned bunch of folks often with a great deal of specialized knowledge and enthusiam for the subject matter.  This is a generation that grew up reading and using reference books and want lists and networking by visiting other bookseller’s stock and visiting libraries and meeting collectors and having learned opinions because they had lived with and grew up with books.  You cannot get that kind of experience staring at a keyboard all day.  The problem with the internet is the scale.  The scale or bigness of the internet is an open invitation for people to find a way to exploit everyone else instantly and cheaply.  Where else can you find spammers filling up your inbox  daily and wasting your time.  Spammers couldn't exist without the internet- they couldn't have printed all that junk and couldn’t have afforded to pay for the mailing of it.  The internet makes it possible for someone on the other side of the world to fish for passwords and social security numbers and  all kinds of private information without even getting out of bed.  Years ago someone would have had to  gone to elaborate measures to steal your identity by forging your signature and walking into some bank but now it is hundreds of thousands of times easier to cheat someone else or commit fraud.  Our store does OK but I don’t want to be in a world where we’re the last one standing.  It’s a better world that supports
many and more bookstores.

Sorry for the rant.

Q.- Last thoughts on Moe?
A.-  A fine man and a good friend.  Bigger that life, never bending to someone else’s expectations.  Picture him breaking into his rendition of Frank Sinatra’s “I did it my way” which he did often.  Picture him eating spaghetti and leaving a permanent record of that meal on his shirt which he often did.  Picture him giving money to some fraud con man which I once witnessed. Picture him quoting Rabelais at length.  He was like a huge cruise ship lit up in kindness and light that laughed and partied and came and left leaving leaving a huge wake in which we are still gently bobbing about in.  That was Moe.


Thanks to Robert Eliason, who didn’t really want to interview me and Doris Moscowitz, who didn't want to ask and to Moe, who has never not been with me.