Powell's City of Books, on the corner of West Burnside and 10th Avenue in Portland, Oregon, occupies a full city block, three floors, and approximately 68,000 square feet of retail space.
It holds, at any given time, somewhere between 800,000 and a million books, of which roughly two-thirds are second-hand. The exact figure is not knowable, and the staff have stopped trying to know it.
On the Tuesday in question, the shop closes at 11 p.m. The doors lock, the foyer empties, and the last customer — a tall woman in a yellow rain jacket carrying a paperback of The Long Ships by Frans G. Bengtsson — leaves at 10:54.
The lights stay on. The night re-shelve has begun.
Powell's organises its stock by colour-coded rooms. Blue is literature. Gold is rare and antiquarian. Purple is small press and graphic novels. Red is science and engineering. Orange is religion and philosophy. Green is travel, history, and the social sciences. Pearl, the smallest, is fine art.
The colour scheme was introduced in 1990, replacing an earlier system based on the names of the original wall paint, which had become illegible after multiple redecorations.
On any given day, the shop's customers pull approximately 4,000 books off the shelves, of which they purchase perhaps a third. The remainder must be re-shelved, and the re-shelve happens in two cycles: a continuous, daytime effort by the floor staff, and a concentrated, post-closing sweep by a smaller crew of about a dozen.
The night crew on the Tuesday includes a man named Carl Vanetti, who has worked at Powell's since 2003. He is the longest-tenured bookseller currently on the night shift.
Vanetti's territory is the Blue Room, which is the largest single section of the shop and which holds, by his rough count, about 180,000 titles. Fiction A through M is upstairs. N through Z, criticism, drama, and poetry are on the main floor.
He starts on the upstairs mezzanine. He carries a green plastic cart with three shelves, fully loaded with books that have accumulated on a re-shelving trolley near the cash register since 4 p.m.
The trolley load is heavily skewed toward certain authors. On any given night, Vanetti will re-shelve at least three copies of Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland, two of Bolaño's 2666, four or five of Sally Rooney's Normal People, and a single dog-eared paperback of Stoner that has been pulled, considered, and returned to the same shelf every Tuesday for at least seven years.
Vanetti has a theory about Stoner. He thinks it is the same customer.
The Blue Room at 11:20 p.m. is, except for Vanetti and the occasional security guard, empty. The HVAC hums. A floor wax machine, somewhere on the level below, makes a slow circular noise. Vanetti shelves at a steady pace — roughly forty books an hour, which is below the floor-day average but appropriate for the precision required.
Used-book shelving at Powell's involves three judgments per title: alphabetical placement, condition check, and price check.
The first is mechanical. The second requires Vanetti to examine the spine, the corners, and the binding for damage that has occurred during the day's handling. The third requires him to confirm that the penciled price inside the front cover is still appropriate.
Roughly one in twenty books is pulled aside for re-pricing. Vanetti carries a small red flag for these. He places the flag in the book, sets it on a separate shelf at the end of his cart, and at the end of the shift the re-pricing pile goes to a buyer named Greta Hsiao who handles overnight valuation.
By midnight, Vanetti has reached the Cs. He pauses at Cather — there are nineteen copies of My Antonia on the shelf, in eight different editions, and he has been asked to thin the section to twelve.
He pulls seven. He puts the cleanest two paperback copies and one of the hardback library editions into a green tote labelled OVERSTOCK / WAREHOUSE. The others go into a tote labelled BARGAIN, where they will be priced at three dollars each and shelved on the rolling carts outside the shop's main entrance.
The bargain carts are Powell's least-discussed feature and, by some measures, its most significant one. They turn over an estimated 1,200 books per week, at margins that are smaller than the indoor stock but that bring in a daily walk-up trade of people who would not otherwise enter the shop.
By 1:14 a.m., Vanetti has finished his cart and started on the second trolley, which has been wheeled over by a colleague named Mira from the M-through-Z side.
Mira is younger, has been at Powell's for two years, and works the night shift because she is writing a novel during the day and finds the morning hours impossible. She and Vanetti do not talk much on shift. They have a working courtesy that is most evident in the way they pass each other in the aisles without looking up.
The Blue Room at 2 a.m. has a quality of intentness that the day-floor never achieves. The colour of the carpet looks more orange under the night lights. The smell of the used books is more present — a low, almost-vegetable warmth that the air conditioning thins out during business hours.
Vanetti finishes at 2:47. He has re-shelved 312 books, pulled 47 for bargain or overstock, and flagged 14 for re-pricing.
He fills out a sheet of paper on a clipboard near the freight elevator. He notes the time, the count, and a single observation: Cather over-stocked, particularly Antonia. Suggest hold on incoming.
He clocks out at 3:02 and walks down West Burnside in the rain to a 24-hour diner two blocks east, where he eats a plate of hash browns and reads the first eighty pages of a Robert Coover novel he has owned for nineteen years and never opened.
The shop opens again at 9 a.m. By 9:15, the first customer is in the Blue Room, pulling the same copy of Stoner off the shelf, considering it for the seven hundredth time, and putting it back. Vanetti, asleep in an apartment in Northeast Portland, does not know this. He will know it, abstractly, when he returns the next night.