Get a job: One day, Shakespeare & Co.'s new owner Jon Wobber was being interviewed by an Oakland Tribune reporter when a guy walked into the Telegraph Avenue bookshop and offered Wobber his résumé. Explaining that the résumé didn't properly reflect his extensive literary knowledge, the would-be clerk assured Wobber that he knows a lot about books.

"Okay," Wobber asked him. "Who wrote Finnegans Wake?"

The guy didn't know. Wobber wrote "Doesn't know" on the résumé. The guy snatched it back and left the store. A few minutes later he returned, handing back the résumé. Having erased Wobber's inscription, he'd replaced it with "Fuck you, elitist fuck."

Welcome to Telegraph.

Wobber started selling books thirty years ago as a Sonoma State student selling secondhand volumes off a raincoat on a campus lawn. That's where he met Harvey Segal, a sociology prof and then-owner of Shakespeare, who hired him as a clerk and, later, sold him the store. Legend has it that Philip K. Dick once worked here too.

(excerpt from an East Bay Express article By Anneli Rufus)