My First Job: The writer Brian Aldiss recalls his days as a bookseller

They'll be dancing in the streets of Alpha Centauri and the Crab Nebula. Signs of intelligent life have been spotted on Earth: the Queen has presented Brian Aldiss with his OBE. Light-years away, alien shapes will be raising their champagne glasses in their tentacles to toast the doyen of British science-fiction writers. Copies of Helliconia Spring, The Hand-reared Boy and Trillion Year Spree will be flying off the shelves wherever life-forms can tell an imaginative yarn from a crater on an dull asteroid.

When the young Aldiss was tentatively putting his first words on paper, he hardly saw the streets, let alone danced in them. His day-job was sometimes a night-job as well, as it kept him working till 8pm, selling other people's books. Demobbed from the army after the Second World War, he never really settled into regular employment until 1947, when he went to Oxford - not to the university (he couldn't get a grant) but to a bookshop. He never left - Oxford, that is.

He was eight years a bookseller, first at a now-defunct shop run by a Mr Saunders and then at Parker's, part of the Blackwell's empire. "I got to know a lot about books," he recalls. "In the antiquarian department, I was handling valuable works: first editions of Pope's Dunciad and Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy. There was a sense that you were part of the machinery of the English language."

Pay-scales seemed to be sucked into a black hole but fellow workers were agreeable. Of the customers, the dons were pompous but the undergraduates were fine. Evelyn Waugh strode in to humiliate the staff, John Betjeman to sell review-copies and Dylan Thomas to borrow a fiver.

Aldiss still likes bookshops: "I spend money on books when I feel a need for more injections of intelligence. I've just bought The Moons of Jupiter, with stunning photos by Nasa."

It was his job which led directly to his first published book. The Bookseller began running a serious series about the trade. Aldiss wrote to the editor, pointing out that these worthy articles had nothing about "the pale face of the bookseller's assistant". He was commissioned to write a series of his own on the infantry manning the tills. This in turn led to Faber and Faber asking him to turn these pieces into a novel: The Brightfount Diaries. "The shop devoted a whole window to it: I was flabbergasted. And they all sold."

The next chapter of his career was the literary editorship of the Oxford Mail - and full-time writing.

'Sanity and the Lady' by Brian Aldiss (PS Publishing, £24) is out now in a limited edition

Email: jonty@jonathansale.com