America's perfect curmudgeon runs sweet bookstore, is like totally awesome

Jim Toole, the proprietor of Capitol Hill books in D.C., appears as a curmudgeon in Caroline Cunningham's wonderful profile of him and his overflowing store.

You also have a list of words that no one is allowed to speak in your store.

I hear Perfect, I hear Like, like, like, like, and I hear Awesome every 32 seconds and it was causing me to have brain damage. So I try to ask people when theyre here to use one of the 30,000 words in the thesaurus other than, Perfect! Awesome! Oh my God! When youre sitting here for 20 years and hear that limited amount of vocabulary that people seem to enjoy using, it really [causes] destruction of gray matter....

The list of books that you wont resellwhy those?

I wont let romance novels pass the door sill.

Why is that?

Because they suck as literature. You like those bodice-rippers? The other thing thats pretty lousy is business. I take business books, business leadership and management crapolaI take them, but I stuff them in the business closet, out of the way. Only because people ask for them, and usually theyre all obsolete the night that theyre printed. I dont let computer books in here because they are obsolete the day theyre printed.

Have a good one, Jim!