torn

"...This tension between hoarding and retailing is both funny and sad, which explains the hilarious pathos that runs through The Pope’s Bookbinder, the sprightly but also melancholy memoirs of David Mason, a Canadian book dealer of international reputation.
     Mason’s father was a stereotypically prudent banker, who often derided his son not only for wasting his youth spent bumming around Europe but also for taking up so impecunious a profession as book dealing.
     As the elder Mason liked to ask his son’s colleagues, 'Why do you guys always only talk about buying books; why don’t you try and sell a book once in a while?'”

— Jeet Heer, The Globe and Mail
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