To work at the Brattle you have to not only love books, but love lifting them. The staff consists of intellectuals with brute strength, a clean driving record, no mold or dust allergies, and a fondness for filth. With the exception of management positions, most of the staff stay at the Brattle for about a year. Ken usually gives a new employee a speech that sounds something like, “I think you are exceptionally intelligent. We are glad to have you working here but I hope you don’t stay too long.” The Brattle is part book store and part half-way house. The employees usually come from diverse backgrounds and stay long enough to collect their bearings before going back into the world as artists, writers, musicians, physical therapists, bookbinders, publishers, teachers or social workers.

The job requires accompanying Ken on morning outings, or “buys,” where he is called to private residences, book stores, libraries, or museums and asked to bid on collections of books. Sometimes a trip will be made to take a look at a single book – but more often than not, someone has died or gotten a divorce or is moving and a few hundred or a few thousand books need to go quickly. When Ken arrives he surveys the books, touching some, flipping a few pages. He has been known to appraise 2,000 books in less than 20 minutes.

When a deal is made, it is up to the one or two staff people who have accompanied Ken to get the books to the truck. The task often involves crawling through attics, navigating dark basements, or braving the stairs of the fifth floor walk-up to box and carry the books to the Suburban, which holds 75 boxes when packed in the precise configuration.

Just about everything that is done at the Brattle has a system that has been refined over the years. When the books get back to the shop they are brought down to the basement where Ken will go through each box and toss the books into piles divided by price. The pricing piles are dangerously built stacks that almost reach the ceiling and can be about six feet deep and fifteen feet long. The job is full of hazards. In fact, employees keep a list of injuries that have been passed down through oral history: the manager who got bursitis in her shoulders; an employee who previously worked as a stonemason and fisherman got a hernia from emptying book-filled garbage cans into the dumpster. At least two previous workers were sent to the emergency room to stitch wounds received from the serrated end of tape guns. But the all-time favorite in the list so far, is a paper cut to the eye – sustained by an employee while wrapping a book for shipping.

When a new employee starts at the shop he or she is slowly filled in on the anecdotal history of the business, such as the story of the former employee who inexplicably weeded the fiction section of all books by French authors. There was once a phone call from a woman who saw Ken on the Antiques Road Show and wanted to bring a World War II–vintage (potentially live) hand grenade into the shop for an appraisal. One man called wanting to bring in what he claimed was a piece of material from the first atomic bomb tests (with apparently no thought to its radioactivity). Ken once had to spend 20 minutes convincing a woman that it was not possible for her to have a photograph of George Washington. “What you have m’am, is what we call a print,” Ken said patiently, “ … yes, I’m sure … because there were no cameras back then…”