This issue features a microinterview with Jonathan Lethem, conducted by Peter Andrey Smith. In addition to being the author of Motherless Brooklyn (1999), Fortress of Solitude (2003), and Chronic City (2009), Jonathan Lethem is a seller of other people’s books. He’s long supplemented his income as a writer by working in used-book stores; it’s the only job he’s ever had. Lethem currently co-owns Red Gap Used Books in Blue Hill, Maine, with André Strong and Marjorie Kernan. Like the title essay of his latest collection, The Ecstasy of Influence (2011), his shelves are a patchwork of collections and influences.

Microinterview with Jonathan Lethem, Part I

THE BELIEVER: You once interviewed Paul Auster for the Believer, and, in the spirit of appropriation, I’d like to ask you the first question you asked him: what were you doing before I arrived at your bookstore today?

JONATHAN LETHEM: I was devouring fish-and-chips and a frosty soft-serve chocolate shake from our local fried-fish emporium, The Fishnet. Before that, I was doing real editorial grunt-work: proof corrections on Philip K. Dick’s Exegesis. One of my fates in life is to be a slave of various dead authors. Philip K. Dick probably never did proof corrections in his life; he was a notoriously sloppy writer. And here I am, giving over weeks of my summer to try to make sense of these scrawled lines that he wrote in these manic, overnight bouts. So yeah, I hit send on the whole shaggy mess just before getting over here, so I’m celebrating with a chocolate shake.

BLVR: If I were to look around the bookstore, would I find much Philip K. Dick?

JL: We have a few of his books. They’re actually some of my favorite books in the world because they’re talismans, simultaneously, of my discovery of his writing and my own interest in a certain eccentric kind of book collecting. His publishing history is a strange one—a lot of his first editions are paperback originals. Very ephemeral items publishing-wise, barely more than a notch above a comic book or a porn magazine. Some of his canonical books now in the Library of America—acid-free, in beautiful bindings, and they will be forever, or for as long as anyone cares about the twentieth-century American canon—were first published in these really sleazy editions, the opposite of acid-free—these were acid-laden pages, 90 percent pure-acid pages.

BLVR: Is that what first attracted you to them?

JL: Absolutely. And the covers were painted by these guys who hadn’t read the inside. They just painted sexy women with three breasts or monsters from the id,...