The Civil Life Library

Because I like to read books, I wanted a career that would pay me to read. There really isn’t one. Even an acquisitions editor probably reads 100 terrible pages for every good one. And my dreams of being an English professor (most of which centered around an endless wine-soaked sabbatical) were laughably unrealistic. The kind of reading one does while teaching freshman composition (and there is a great deal of it) is not quite what I had in mind. The crowning insult is that it doesn’t pay very well either. So I needed another job. Thankfully my friend Jake hired me to tend bar at The Civil Life . I had spent the previous years of my life on the other side of the bar, but as Charles Bukowski once said, “Hey, either side’s fine, as long as the bottle pours.”

[UPDATE 2012-03-20: In this space, I used to have an embedded LIFE magazine slideshow of pictures of various authors who are/were heavy drinkers. It appears that is no longer available.]

So as not to have wasted my twenty years of college, I carefully assembled a library of great books and installed them at The Civil Life. Read more about it here.