Sunday Salon - The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop

The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop by Lewis Buzbee is 'a memoir, a history', it says above his name on the cover. And it is. It's his memoir of his life in books. He's worked in bookstores, he's worked for publishers, and wherever he's gone he's discovered bookstores that he loves. He buys books like we do and loves them like we do.

I love how he phrases what happens between the bookseller and the bookbuyer - the customer- at the cash register, where the exchange of money for goods actually takes place: "Out on the floor, it's all possibility, what a customer might choose to purchase, but at the counter, once the register starts ringing, that's where the revelations are. These are the books the customer will take home to read or stack up or offer as a gift, and each book, in some way, represents a part of that person's life. It's not a mere tally of reading tastes, who likes what authors, it's a gauge of what concerns people, what occupies them. There, face to face over the elbow-polished wood of the counter, bookseller and customer share a silent but telling moment......It's a little like looking into another person's heart."
The interesting thing about the above quote is that Buzbee stops the point he is making there. I've worked in bookstores for quite a few years, and I'd like to take it a step further: In that moment where the bookseller and the customer share the exchange of books, where the bookseller knows what occupies the reader, it is a sanctified moment. The bookseller might go back and say "do you know what Mrs So-and-So bought today?" and the other staff will muse on it, perhaps exclaim if it is something out of the ordinary and try to guess why, but what the very good booksellers will do with that information is file it away for next time. So when you, or Mrs So-and-So, come back into the shop, the very good bookseller will mention casually, "so, how did you find the book?" That moment of revelation at the cash register is handled as a special moment, by the very good bookseller. I don't want to say sanctified, but it's what I mean - it is a kind of holy moment, because our hearts as book buyers are revealed. A very good bookseller will keep that memory of what we buy and build on it to create trust, so that when he or she offers us a book or author next time, it's built on knowledge of what we were interested in before. While one part might be interested in selling books - it is a business - for most booksellers, the joy is the pleasure of putting an unknown, unthought-of, new book in the customer's hand, and it is the right one. That moment for us the bookseller, makes it all worthwhile. The privilege of looking into your heart, is being able to find another book treasure for you. That's what kind of joy comes through The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop. It was a real pleasure to read. I felt like he was an old friend, who I had never met, but once we began talking, instantly understood one another.

I will say that having read Alberto Manguel's A History of Reading last year, was a good basis on which to judge this one, as The Yelloow-Lighted Bookshop does cover the book history also. What is interesting is where they differ: A History of Reading delves more into words and language development, and fascination with how people have always wanted to read, and the power that goes with it; The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop is about the bookseller, those who made the books available, and how bookstores developed. These two books make very good companions for eachother, and I would reccommend reading A History of Reading first, as its breadth and depth of book knowledge is deeper than that of The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop. I enjoyed them both immensely, feeling myself privileged to be a part of their company: these are men whose love of books I share in equal measure. We are all bibliophiles!


One thing Buzbee does do in The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop is talk about Shakespeare & Co, the original English-language bookstore in Paris, that was the first publisher of Ulysses by James Joyce when it was banned in the UK and the US. It was fascinating reading, to see how the first copy was made, because the French printer had to develop a new typing set of English letters first, before the manuscript could even be set, never mind run off. 10,000 copies over 10 years were eventually published by Sylvia Beach, the owner of Shakespeare & Co, before the lawsuit was repealed in the US and Ulysses could be published legally there again. Much of The Yellow-lighted Bookshop is about the role of the bookseller in keeping books available to the public. He has a whole chapter on banned books, mentioning subjects like Salman Rushdie, The Anarchist's Cookbook - which back in the early 1990's was a popular book, but already one Customs at Canadian borders had on the black list. At one of the independent bookstores I worked at way back in 1992, we did have customers who wanted it. We could only get it through special orders, which we would do, warning the customer that the book may or may not make it through Customs. Quite often the book would be confiscated, and we would get the envelope with a Customs note inside, saying the book was being held and not allowed entry into Canada. A few times the book did get through, and being curious (as all booksellers are, Buzbee notes) I looked through it. It was an anarchist's book, showing how to create pipe bombs and other destructive weapons, and discussing the role of anarchy in society. Is it a dangerous book? Buzbee doesn't say, nor do I - the information is available on the internet, and in other ways, and banning it doesn't change the information. As with all information, it's how it's used, that makes it dangerous or good. I think it's interesting, if only from my writer's persepctive as I have no idea nor interest in destroying anything, but I might have a character in a book who does. That role of bookseller as protecter of books is something Buzbee also explores.

In this same chapter on banned books, he reveals a discussion he had once with a bookseller, on the floor, about a children's book. He was working for a publisher at the time, and thought this book would be good for the children's section. The bookstore buyer had other ideas:
" The book under discussion was a picture book, new on the list, and i was showing it to the buyer to see how many copies she'd like. It was a counting book, set in the American Southwest, and the characters were rabbits dressed in the custumes of the region's Indian tribes. I was going through my spiel, pointing out that the book was thoroughly researched, and the costumes and activities depicted were authentic. The book buyer objected. She would never buy this book for her store; she was offended that Indians were being portrayed as animals and felt that the book was dehumanizing. I countered that many, if not most, children's books made animals out of humans. The argument escalated quickly, both of us refining and repeating our positions, a little more loudly with each repetition, until finally I lost my cool, rose to my feet, and found myself yelling in the middle of the children's section: " They're goddamn bunnies and it's a goddamn kid's book." After which I stormed out. Eventually this buyer and I became close friends, and later we would talk about how much we had enjoyed this argument, not for argument's sake, but for the passion therein, and the sense that a kid's book, one little book about rabbits, was important enough to lose one's dignity over."

Don't we all share this passion? I know that when I worked in bookstores, we would argue over books, what to put on the shelf, what to carry, who not to have - this is something Buzbee also covers in his book. This passion for reading, for books, is something all book readers and book sellers share. This is a book about his passion, and it is a lovely book and very highly recommended. I also love how he is not pretentious at all, how he thinks it's the act of reading that is important, not just what is being read:

"Let children find their own pleasure in reading........a couple came in one day and asked me to choose several 'classics' for their eleven-year-old daughter. She loved to read, they said, it was practically all she did, but she read only 'trash'. At the time she was consumed by The Babysitter's Club.......I was showing them what we had, when I noticed their daughter nearby, seated on the floor in front of the shelf where we kept The Babysitter's Club. She was poring over the newest book in the series, reading as fast as she possibly could the only book she wanted. I hope I remember correctly that, along with Ivanhoe that day, they also bought number 37 in the Babysitter series." It's a secret world, he says Steinbeck said, and I agree: I know, that in my life, I've encountered books that taught me how to move in the larger world, in public. I needed that secret place to encounter the possibility first, and what to do. That private place that we go to, the hidden inner space where we encounter the book, is where the exchange takes place. I take in the book, and come out a wiser person. This how Anne of Green Gables handled this, this is what happened when Peter Rabbit stole the carrots, this is what Bilbo felt far away from home. Because we first encounter books in childhood, that is where the love of reading is most often found to have started.

As someone who reads fairly slowly, I am somewhat comforted and disheartened by his stats on books: "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 the preceding 100 years.....These are figures for American publishing only...... If you read one book a week, starting at age 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."

So, since I have no chance whatsoever of reading more than say, 5 per cent of books currently in print, why do I buy so many? Because I still want to read all that I can, while I can. At least I don't have to read indiscriminately, or, as I confess I once upon a time did, read to impress others - college and university are good for that, if for nothing else these days! - and as long-time readers of my blog know, I struggle with my Cool Inner Literary Book Snob daily. I want to be like that 11 year old girl he talks about, and read what I love to read, as much as I can while I can. I will say my CILBS is ever so delighted that I loved Middlemarch earlier this year! There are so many books, how to choose? Sometimes it's the way the light falls on a cover, Buzbee says, or the mood you are in. There are books for everything. That is the pure delight and joy and wonder of going into a bookstore: what will I find today? what wants to come home with me? what do I need to read today? That sense of wonder and joy and pleasure and delight - that's what we all experience when we find our book of the day.

I am glad that Buzbee is 'promiscuous' when it comes to bookstores, as he says: the book industry has changed to adapt to big box stores, and somehow, independents are surviving still. He argues that we need them both, and I hereby give my second secret confession: I buy books at both independents and our big box bookstore, Chapters. I even own a Chapters card, which gives me discount on all regular and sale-priced books I buy. (see yesterday forsecret confession #1). I love books, and the box stores are good for books too, the ones that offer reading chairs, and allow you to read books off the shelves, and provide coffebars for after you've bought that book. It's taken me a long time to accept this, but even I have adapted! While there is still not the selection I'd like to see stocked at Chapters, there is a greater variety provided, that a smaller independent store just can't offer. At least we have a choice, still, and different bookstores for different moods we are in. I love my mystery independent bookstore, but get there only two times a year. I miss the fantasy and science fiction bookstore Ottawa used to have, which has been gone for 8 years now. Nothing has replaced that. I could get all the specialty small publisher books there, that no one else carries in the city. However, there is the internet, where the publishers are now available to customers directly for the first time. Buzbee even covers that, in his added chapter at the end of the book. He argues that since books came into being, they've been threatened: "The Death of the Book is Nigh!" and somehow, even through the Alexandra Library burning down, through the Middle-Ages where the church controlled all existences of books, down through to the internet, e-books and kindle, there is something about the shape and texture and weight of a book that survives, and keeps surviving, and hopefully, probably, will survive into the future.

So reading The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop is like having a lovely long conversation over tea and cake about the subject I am most passionate about, about the subject Buzbee is so passionate about, about what we all who write our blogs about books, and read long into the night and when the housework should be done and the kids get sandwiches again, are so passionate about in our very hearts and depths of our souls: we love books, and there is nothing like talking passionately about them, except escaping to our reading corner and reading them.

Happy Sunday reading, my Gentle Readers!

A History of Reading

Why do we read? This question went around in a meme not too long ago, and I didn't answer it then, because I didn't get around to it. I liked one answer (and I'm sorry, I can't remember who wrote it), when she said she read like she breathed. There was no reason why, or there are so many reasons why, there is simply, and wholly, reading because there are books. I read because I can, because I am fortuante enough to have an education that enables me to, and because, like the unknown blog writer said, I read like I breathe. A History of Reading is about this feeling we who read books all share - we read because we can, because books are there, because it gives us knowledge and a way to see the world through other experiences, because - I think - we each essentially experience the world only through our own eyes and experiences. Books are a way to bridge that gap.

A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel covers why we read, the - a - history of reading, from the development of writing on stone tablets in Sumaria, straight up to the computer. He doesn't mention 'kindle' because this book was written in 1998, and kindle is a 21st century invention. If he ever revises A History, I'm certain kindle will have a section! I've wanted to read this book for 10 years, since it first was published. It was a bestseller when it was first published, and we sold so many at the bookstore I then worked at, Books Canada (now sadly closed), that we couldn't keep it in stock. I now know why. This book is necessary for book readers like water is for breathing. It traces the history and development of books and people's attitudes to books from the very origins of Sumerian writing on clay tablets, to current thoughts by Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolfe, Kafka, Carolyn Heilbrun. This books covers everything to do with books, from Socrates, Plato, to the Bible, to the Japanese pillow book and Chinese literature, Nigerian reading aids, scrolls, vellum, and then paper. There is a chapter on reading glasses - only 7% of the population needs glasses, but this rises to 24% for people who read books!! No wonder the image of books readers as wearing glasses came about! But, this is not a dry, dreary text of facts. Manguel writes in a fluid manner, beginning each chapter at the beginning of whichever subject he is covering, and then moving through time, always ending in the present. Some chapter headings are: Learning to Read, The Shape of the Book, Private Reading, Metaphors of Reading, The Symbolic Reader, Stealing Books, Forbidden Reading, The Book Fool. It is about the joy of reading, the power conferred by being able to make sense of letters on the page, about the wisdom contained in those words, and how it affects us the readers, and thus the world. When you see someone reading a book you have read, what is your first impulse? Here is Manguel's: "Sitting across from me in the subway in Toronto, a woman is reading the Penguin edition of Borges's Labyrinths. I want to call out to her, to wave a hand and signal that I too am of that faith. She, whose face I have forgotten, whose clothes I barely noticed, young or old I can't say, is closer to me, by the mere act of holding that particular book in her hands, than many others I see daily." How many times have you seen someone reading a book, a stranger, and longed to go talk to them about it? I know I have, many times, and have to practically restrain myself if they happen to be reading a book I love. That sense of kinship is what A History of Reading is all about. This is a book about the love of books.

However, Manguel says this is not the definitive history of reading. This is his version, one version, a history as he has discovered it. There is room for other histories, other versions, and indeed this is part of the pleasure of this book - he layers textures of meanings, building a picture of a reader, who not only reads the book in his or her hand, but all the books that went before, all the way to the first time mankind discovered that by marking a clay tablet, they could make someone else who was not there, understand what they meant on the page. Every chapter builds on this idea, and all his arguments complete this fascinating idea. I have really enjoyed reading about and thinking about Manguel's book ideas and presentation of book history. We have books now because of what Plato argued about them, what Socrates thought, because of the Christian Church, because of Moslems, because of the monks endlessy transcribing for centuries, because women's literature has always been specifically about romance. Whether developed in Japan or in France or England and centuries apart, women's knowledge of the world has been for the most part limited to romance, relationships, the home- by men the world over, but that is another argument for another time! What interests me are the women who did learn to read anyway - Julian of Norwich, Saint Theresa - women became mystics because that was the only other area left open for them to explore, constrained as they were by politics. The human spirit wants expressing, and words are one powerful way of expression. Women the world over wanted to read, wrote their own books - this is how pillow books in 16th century Japan developed - because they weren't allowed to read any others. That desire to write, and the desire to read what has been written - that is what this book is about. The Negros in the American South were banned from reading, from even learning how to spell, because books led to thinking, and thinking led to freedom, in the white slavers minds. Still, many risked their lives to learn, and teach others secretly. A History of Reading is about this passion that made people risk their lives the world over, time and time again, to learn how to read, so they could write and reach out to others, what Manguel calls 'the shadowy others' that is the reader, vague until the book is picked up and read. You are that reader, I am that reader. 100 years from now, our great-grandchildren will be that reader. To have our voices heard is a powerful motivator. To not be silenced. That is why lives have been risked, and always will be, for the sake of reading and writing.

How have humans written? How was it received? What does the reader do by reading it? We 'devour books, eat them ravenously, are nourished by them, feast our mind' on them. We try to make the book ours. What is important is what comes out of this, Manguel writes: "However readers make a book theirs, the end is that book and reader become one. The world that is a book is devoured by a reader who is a letter in the world's text; thus a circular metaphor is created for the endlessness of reading. We are what we read. The process by which the circle is completed is not, {Walt} Whitman argued, merely an intellectual one; we read intellectually, on a superficial level, grasping certain meanings and conscious of certain facts, but at the same time, invisibly, unconsciously, text and reader become intertwined, creating new levels of meaning, so that every time we cause the text to yield something by ingesting it, simultaneously something else is born beneath it that we haven't yet grasped. That is why - as Whitman believed, rewriting and re-editing his poems over and over - no reading can ever be definitive." (p 173) So, this book is not definitive either - I have my own ideas about reading and books that have been altered by reading this book, and that every other reader of it has done too. That, I think, is part of the allure and fascination of books, and sometimes we find we can't go back to the same book we read once along ago. Because we have changed, so our reading of the book has changed, because the book changed already. Like the never-ending circle, the snake Orobouros that devours the world, we write the books we need to read, and by reading them, we change the books again. It also raises a very interesting idea, that I know I have hinted at in my blog, without knowing it was what I was saying, until I read it in this book:
"We never return to the same book or even to the same page, because in the varying light we change and the book changes, and our memories grow bright and dim and bright again, and we never know exactly what it is we learn and forget, and what it is we remember. What is certain is that the act of reading, which rescues so many voices from the past, preserves them sometimes well into the future, where we may be able to make use of them in brave and unexpected ways." (p 64)

I like that idea, that we use the knowledge we find in books. I think we do. Even if the most a book can do is get us to think, to recognize the power of our own ideas and that our actions matter, that is the most important fact about them, and why they have been censored and banned from almost the very first tablet. In books where the writer writes the truth, touches on it - and this is just as easily in a book of fiction as well as non-fiction - the book can bring a light of awareness to the reader, so they are changed by reading it. That hunger to know, to be made aware - even if it is of fairies and beauty, or as quiet as love, or as thundering as human rights - I think mankind wants to know the truth of this world we find ourselves in. Books - and A History of Reading explores - how we have grown in our ability to share ideas, thoughts, feelings, history, experience, with each other through the medium of the word. We discern the writer's ideas through what we bring to the reading. This is what he means by we change and how we read changes, so going back is never the same. We change, and can change the world, because of what we read. By the way, I am not going to discuss the next line of thought - the conclusion to where I'd normally be heading, banning books, because I am saving that post for when I finish my Banned Book challenge reading in June. However, do go see my next post on Fahrenheit 451, because I can't write a review of that book without talking about banning, and I'm all 'fired' up - Pun intented!!!- after reading this powerful science fiction novel. The power of books, indeed.

I recommend A History of Reading - which mentions Fahrenheit 451, by the way! - so highly. It really is worth reading, just so we can say, this is how books, which I love so much, developed. This is how we thought about them this long ago, and why, and who was allowed to read, and who is allowed to read now. So that, when you next pick up your paperback you are reading, part of you will remember that it developed in its final cheap shape in 1935 when Allan Lane brought out the first Penguin books because he wanted "a line of cheap but good-sized pocket books....They would publish a series of brightly-coloured paperback reprints of the best authors. They would not merely appeal to the common reader; they would tempt everyone who could read, highbrows and lowbrows alike." I like this quote because he got the idea while looking for something to read at the train station after spending a weekend at Agatha Christie's, and he was able to use one of her books - The Mysterious Affair at Styles - among the first 10 published on July 30, 1935, for 6 pence a book. A History of Reading covers many topics about reading, of which I've given you only a sampling, because it is literary feast of authors, from the beginning of time to current day. It's like going on a picnic and discovering a banquet of writers and ideas and words all on books, my passion. It is wonderful discovering (as indeed these blogs do now) that there have always existed people for whom books were their life-long passion. We owe alot -everything - to the printers, scribes, bookbinders, publishers, and further back poets and orators, who kept writing down their words and transcribing them for others to read. Where they went, I can follow. And across the lonely centuries, I can hear the thoughts, the whispers of another, and know that my soul was not the only one enchanted by the stars, or dying for love, or championing the poor. If we read to find ourselves, as indeed many have thought, then we read to find out everything about ourselves, the glorious as well as the dark, and books hold all this, each and every book in existence today. That is the power of the book.

Why do we keep books? Why do we go back to them if we change, and our reading of them changes? What is our enduring fascination with them? I think it's because we think we can still find something in them. And, as I discussed in an earlier meme, we see our history, our lives, our book-reading lives, before us, through the books on our shelves. Manguel writes of much the same thing in his chapter called "Book Stealing": I am once again about to move house......As I build pile after pile of familiar volumes I wonder, as I have wondered every other time, why I keep so many books that I know I will not read again. I tell myself that, every time I get rid of a book, I find a few days later that this is precisely the book I'm looking for. I tell myself there are no books (or very, very few) in which I have found nothing at all to interest me. I tell myself that I brought them into my house for a reason in the first place, and that this reason may hold good again in the future......I enjoy the sight of my crowded bookshelves, full of more or less familiar names. I delight in knowing that I'm surrounded by a sort of inventory of my life, with intimations of my future......I could, if I had to, abandon all these books of mine and begin again, somewhere else; I have done so, several times, out of necessity. But then I also have to acknowledge a grave, irreparable loss. I know that something dies when I give up my books, and that my memory keeps going back to them with mournful nostalgia." (p238.) I have to admit that i have used every one of these excuses myself!! And that mournful nostalgia is what prompted me to write that post about books I've loved and lost. And I do really think that looking at our bookshelves, we get a sense of who we are, who we were, who we want to be. The loneliest house, the emptiest house, the house where I always thought I would end up without much to say, is the house without books.

I have bookmarked this book again, and I know I will return to it again. It is written in an engaging, open, friendly style, like a long discussion of books at a dinner table. Wouldn't you like to sit at that table? Hmmm, now I'm desiging a room for writers and publishers and readers in my mind!, a huge room where anything can be read and discussed. That is what a book is, for me. A History of Reading has brought together a wide range of writers and readers - because one can't exist without the other, a point Manguel makes over and over again in the book! - over the centuries, a digestible feast of book history that makes me want to run out and look at old books in second-book stores just to see what the oldest book they have is, and buy it and treasure it just for what it represents: two hundred years ago this book was made, and has been kept alive through readers, up until now, when I hold this book in my hand. I may not agree with what the author says, but at least I can argue with him, and thus his ideas are brought forward again for the future. Or hers...that is the wonder of books, for me. Time exists, but becomes timeless because of books. Or, if not timeless, is made less far away, less impenetrable.

Although this is a long review, I want to end with a quote from A History of Reading, because I think it encapsulates it all:
' "I have sometimes dreamt" {Virginia Woolf} wrote, "that when the Day of Judgement dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards - their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble - the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under our arms, 'Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading.' " (p 312)