There are some people - hopeless romantics mostly - who wake up one day and decide that whatever they're doing for a living right then is just not right. Nothing will do but to become a bookseller. The first step is to hit the local bookstore circuit looking for a job. If that strategy fails, or even if it succeeds, the next step is mortgaging everything one owns, or perhaps tapping into family resources to start one's own bookstore. I'm not one of those people.

There are, no doubt, some who know at a very early age that they want to sell books when they grow up - or possibly as an alternative to growing up. To be surrounded by words and sentences and ideas on paper is their notion of earthly paradise. I wasn't one of those either. I spent my childhood and adolescence building model cars - but that didn't mean I was headed for a career as a car designer. (I didn't even learn to drive until I was twenty.) While I was having a typically unproductive and carefree teendom playing air guitar to Cream and Jimi Hendrix, no doubt some guy across town was training for a career in bookselling by setting up a card table in front of his house to flog his old Hardy Boys and Tom Swift books to the neighbourhood kids.

I just kind of fell into bookselling by accident. Actually, it was all my wife's doing. One day she quit her job, after one too many fights with her supervisor, and on the way home she walked into a bookstore and got hired. A few years later, I was forced to close the once-prosperous retail business I owned (I fell into that one too, but that's another story) and hadn't decided what to do next. A couple of months of moping around feeling sorry for myself was about all my wife could take, so she suggested that the manager of her employer's branch store might want to give me a part-time job. He did, and it worked into full-time; the stores eventually amalgamated into larger premises and here I am, seventeen years later, still working as a bookseller even though I was never actually formally hired. And a good thing, too, since I don't think I'd have made it through the interview. As for my wife, she quit bookselling long ago and took up accounting. Somebody in the household has to live in the real world!

Seventeen years is a long time to do an accidental job, but it turned out to suit me, and I seem to be pretty good at it. I happen to have the kind of mind that remembers the arcana of the business: various publisher's ISBN prefixes, who distributes which books, who owns whom this week, who's likely to have rights to a book if the first company you try doesn't. All that stuff that makes satisfying the customer possible.

And, ultimately, that's what it's all about. There's no greater thrill in this business than being able to listen to a customer's vague description of plot or content or the colour of a book's cover and be able to come up with the right book in the customer's hand. And until someone builds an Internet search engine with that kind of fuzzy logic capability, there'll still be a demand for what we human booksellers do.

But let's not get too high and mighty about it. I try not to buy into the mythology of books as supreme cultural objects. Face it, most of what we sell comes under the category of entertainment; selling great literature and nothing else won't pay the bills. A lot of booksellers hate to hear the word "product" used for what we sell, but that's what a good deal of it is. Nevertheless, if it's what the readers want, we're here to provide it. Books are important to our customers, but probably no more so than the right tackle is to the avid fly-fisherman, or the right tool to the craftsman, or the right instrument to the musician. Individuals tend to inflate the importance of what matters to them. But it's my job to try to see things in a broader perspective. There are lots of great and not-so-great books around to read, enjoy, contemplate, champion, argue about and disparage, but not many of them are going to change the world.

Yes, some people are born booksellers and some have bookselling thrust upon them. Maybe the latter are more cynical. I'd rather think of it as more realistic.