The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop (thoughts)

After yesterday’s downer of a review, I wanted to be perky again. So, here’s an uber-positive review of Lewis Buzbee’s memoir The Yellow Lighted Bookshop with a ton of juicy quotes at the bottom. :) The picture is my favourite local used bookstore: Poor Richards.

Among many things, book blogging opened my eyes to a category of books I’d never thought of before: books about books. More specifically, books about book loving! I’ve been catching up since then, though: from memoirs by librarians (Free For All), collections of book reviews (Classics for Pleasure, Bound to Please, and The Polysyllabic Spree), bookish travelogues (Sixpence House), histories (A History of Reading and A Gentle Madness), just essays about books and reading (Ruined by Reading, Ex Libris, So Many Books, So Little Time, How Reading Changed My Life), and even how-to books (How Novels Work and How to Read a Novel), I’ve developed quite a love of this subgenre. Sure, it doesn’t always work out, but when it does, it’s pure magic!

The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop is one of my favourite reads in awhile. I checked it out from my library, but now I really want my very own copy; it’s one of those books I’ll come back to again and again. It’s a small book: the hardcover edition is barely larger than a typical mass market paperback and it just passes the two-hundred page mark. However, its size belies the delight in store for you. Buzbee has worked with books for most of his life: first in bookstores and later as a sales representative. Part of the book consists of his thoughts on books, the publishing industry, how people become obsessive readers, etc. Interwoven with this are chapters on the history of books, libraries, and book publishers.

So you’ll learn about the great library of Alexandria, as well as the original American-run, Paris-located Shakespeare & Co and how it came to publish Ulysses. Towards the end of the book, Buzbee touches on contemporary book-related issues, such as banned books and how big box stores and on-line sites have affected independent bookstores; he’s never polemical, so it’s refreshing to read his discussion of the issues. And as if that’s not enough, he ends the book with recommended bookstores throughout the U.S. and world!

Throughout, the book has an informal, wondrous tone to it that fits perfectly with the material: I immediately recognised Buzbee as a fellow book lover, so it was nice to settle down to hear his thoughts! I’ve marked passages on almost every page, which you can read at the bottom, but for now I’ll just share the book’s opening sentences. They provide a good flavour of what The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop essentially is: a love letter to books and reading throughout the ages.

When I walk into a bookstore, any bookstore, first thing in the morning, I’m flooded with a sense of hushed excitement. I shouldn’t feel this way. I’ve spent most of my adult life working in bookstores, either as a bookseller or a publisher’s sales rep, and even though I no longer work in the business, as an incurable reader I find myself in a bookstore at least five times a week. Shouldn’t I be blase about it all now? In the quiet of such a morning, however, the store’s displays stacked squarely and its shelves tidy and promising, I know that this is no mere shop. When a bookstore opens its doors, the rest of the world enters, too, the day’s weather and the day’s news, the streams of customers, and of course the boxes of books and the many other worlds they contain-books of facts and truths, books newly written and those first read centuries before, books of great relevance and of absolute banality. Standing in the middle of this confluence, I can’t help but feel the possibility of the universe unfolding a little, once upon a time.

Favourite Passages (The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop)
But 90 percent of us who buy books still get out of the house and go to the bookstore, to be among the books, yes, but also to be among other book buyers, the like-minded, even if we never say a word to them.

At Upstart Crow, and in each bookstore after that, I’ve always been thrilled by the arrival of boxes of books, and on opening those books, the goods that would spill out. I’ve never tired of this, and even when I visit a bookstore today, I’m drawn to the stacks of books that clutter the aisles-hey, you need a hand with those?

There’s nothing exceptional in my reading history, and that’s why I’ve chosen to detail it. For those who are afflicted with book lust, those for whom reading is more than information or escape, the road to our passion is quite simple, paved merely by the presence of printed matter.

Steinbeck’s words, and those of the writers who followed, took me out of my San Jose self and transported me to new worlds. In the course of one week, ensconced in the big chair, I might travel to Kenya or Peru, enjoy the decadence of an English manor, or get shipped to the Gulag; I could be man or woman, child or ghost.

How many books have been sacrificed to the fires of those who insisted on the need for only the one book: The Koran, The Bible, Mein Kamf, The Communist Manifesto, Mao’s Little Red Book? Too many, that’s certain, but it’s also certain that the tide of books cannot be stopped by fire.

Customers are seduced into a bookstore because it seems to thrive; we want to see lots of books. We are much more likely to be drawn to a messy bookstore than a neat one because the mess signifies vitality. We are not drawn to a bookstore because of tasteful, Finnish shelves in gunmetal gray mesh, each one displaying three carefully chose, color-coordinated covers. Clutter-orderly clutter, if possible-is what we expect. Like a city. It’s not quite a city unless there’s more than enough.

During the nineteenth century, 90 percent of all books sold in the United States were purchased from traveling book agents. For thousands of years, around the world, this was how most readers outside the city walls obtained their books, by taking notice of the bright rags and flags of a stranger coming down the road.

But the greatest pleasure I found as a sales rep came through decidedly noncommercial and one-on-one transactions. Sales reps get to give away books.

It’s estimated that before the printing press, there were only 50,000 books in all of Europe; fifty years after Gutenberg’s first Bible, there were more than 20 million.

From the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, books were stored horizontally on their shelves, rather than vertically, and the spines would have faced the backs fo the shelves rather than the customer. Most books would lack covers (title pages, however, were no included), be completely unbound, and stacked in loose quires (signatures of twenty-four pages). After choosing a book, the customer would then select the color and cost of binding that would most suit the volume and his library decor. Or one could choose to read the book as is, without covers, an early prototype of the paperback. After the eighteenth century, books were sold in their bindings, and shelved vertically and spine out, as they are today.

A timely addition to the evolution of the English coffeehouse was the introduction of tobacco from the Americas. The two new drugs formed a perfect recipe for the “sociable procrastination” of the coffeehouse, where one could now sit for hours, alternately buzzed up and mellowed out, talking with others under the same influences.

Books in Print currently lists nearly 4 million active titles and 1.5 million out-of-print titles. Since 1980, over 2 million new books have been created, compared to the 1.3 million titles published in the preceding 100 years. …If you read one book a week, starting at the age of 5, and live to be 80, you will have read a grand total of 3,900 books, a little over one-tenth of one percent of the books currently in print. It may be premature for social critics to claim the death of the age of literacy; we’re swimming in books.

Books do make perfect gifts, but by their very nature, books can also be a problem as tokens of affection. The delay factor is huge. …You can thank the gift giver for the gesture, but true thanks for the book have to wait until it’s been read. It’s always dicey choosing that gift book, too. You may have loved it, but your close friend, unbeknownst to you, doesn’t find books about talking Minotaurs that exciting. This is something akin to giving a sweater that’s the wrong size, except that there are 3.7 million sizes to choose from. A book gift can be a difficult transaction for both parties; the recipient doesn’t immediately know what to say, the giver may have to wait months or years for the final thank you. Awkward silences ensue. Don’t let any of this stop you, though.

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