The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop by Lewis Buzbee

The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop: a memoir, a history is, like the subtitle indicates, both a memoir of Lewis Buzbee’s years as a bookseller and a sales representative for a publisher, and a history of bookselling and publishing; of how the two go hand in hand. I posted briefly about this book before: Susan and I were supposed to read it together one chapter a week. But I realized that this rhythm wasn’t going to work for me, and Susan was kind enough to forgive me.

The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop is actually about many things. One of my favourite things about it—besides Buzbee’s obvious love of bookstores and books—was the insight into what goes on behind the scenes in the publishing world. “On the Road”, his essay about his experience as a sales rep, made me want to buy more books and buy them faster. Now, you could argue that this is the last thing I need. But Lewis Buzbee explains how, with more and more books being published every year, sales in the first couple of weeks can make or break an author. Sometimes publishers declare a title out of print after only 2-3 months, and brand new copies end up in bargain bins. This is good for us book buyers, but not so good for the author, who not only doesn’t get any royalties from these sales, but is also unlikely to be offered a contract for a second book. So yeah, maybe it’s not such a bad thing that we have hundreds of books on our tbr piles.

(And on a related note, yesterday I came across this very interesting article by Cory Doctorow about the role of sales reps and publishing in general.)

Lewis Buzbee's love for bookselling permeates the whole book, and it actually made me consider it as a solution to my apparently everlasting what-the-hell-am-I-going-to-do-with-my-life crisis. Look at this:

A bookseller is, first and last, the custodian of a wonderful space, a groundskeeper concerned with the order and care and stock of that space. The bookseller both maintains and presents the space to the public, while at the same time protecting that space and its contents from the same public. Day to day bookselling is more about the physical world than the loftier realms.

And this:

Why do people go into bookselling? It’s not for the money, or the glamour, or the secure future. The answer is simple: love. You love books so much that you believe a book, any book, is an important object, nearly sacred. You also believe that the free trade of those books is key to a society’s democratic nature.

Sounds like something I should be doing. Most of all, I like how he describes bookstores as safe havens, as slow place, as places full of possibilities. I feel that whenever I enter one. The essay “Bibliopolis, the City of Books” was a particularly good one for this reason. There’s also the traditional association between books and coffee. To open my own bookstore/café will always be a dream .

Other favourites include “Not My Doolittle You Don’t” , an essay where he retells the story of Shakespeare & Co. and the publication of Ulysses. No matter how one happens to feel about Joyce, it’s a great story. I particularly love all the ideas Sylvia Beach came up with to get copies of the book to buyers in countries where it had been banned. Now that’s a passionate and dedicated bookseller if there ever was one.

“Not My Doolittle You Don’t” is also about Banned Books Week, an event that is always widely celebrated in the book blogging world, and about the notion of “updating” older children’s books that happen to have questionable content. I agree with Buzbee that this is unsettling. I fear that, for example, refusing to expose children to the blatant racism of the past will hinder their ability to identify it in the present. And this is only one of the many problems this raises. As he puts it, “We could not change the past, nor, it turned out, did we want to. To erase one past of the past, we felt, was to threaten losing all of it.”

As you can no doubt tell by now, I loved this book. But Lewis Buzbee almost lost me here:

Novels for younger readers have the same range of setting and intent as “real novels”, however. These writers who don’t traffic in the overt fantasy that seems to sway adults to this section—Robert Cormier, Virginia Hamilton, Jerry Spinelli, Francesca Lia Block, Brock Cole, Louisie Fitzhigh, et al—ought to be as read, discussed, and lauded as the most seriously considered adult novels.

I’m all for praising children’s literature, but my heart skipped a beat because for a moment I thought he was suggesting that these authors should be taken seriously as opposed to the ones who do traffic in “overt fantasy”. But I refuse to believe that he meant it like that. It’s funny: the people who see my reading fantasy as a serious character flaw (and believe me, I’ve met my share of them) are always most offended not by the fact that I read it, but by the fact that I refuse to be embarrassed or apologetic about it, to treat it as (ugh) a “guilty pleasure”. I take my fantasy books (and my children’s books, and my comics, etc.) as seriously as Pulitzer or Booker winners, or as classics. Why wouldn't I? Of course that some books are richer than others, but I don’t think this has anything to do with genre. And I don’t know how to read in any other way.

One last thing: my edition of the book has an afterword from June 2008, in which he talks about bookselling nowadays and (hooray) says nice thing about book bloggers:

One reader would see the book in a bookstore, pick it up, and write something nice about it in her blog, and that blog posting would circulate elsewhere on the web. Readers of those reviews would then buy it and pass it on to others, almost always in some electronic form, and they, in turn, would go to their bookstores to buy it. The web was—somewhat to my Luddite chagrin—connecting readers, and it did not keep them out of the bookstore. I saw this most when readers from far-flung places ended up with the book—Malaysia, India, Australia, Norway, and so on. I had proof that the brave new world didn’t have to be an either-or proposition.

Now is the time to say that I bought this book because of Eva’s review. And who knows, maybe this post will inspire someone else to pick it up. The internet is indeed connecting readers. Like Buzbee, I am a lover of brick-and-mortar bookstores. But I love how the internet allows that sort of connection, and how it gives more obscure books and authors a second chance.

A few more memorable passages:

It’s important to remember that the death of literature, of a literate culture, is not an idea we twenty-first centurions invented. In the nineteenth century, the invention of the bicycle was believed to mark the end of civilization; we would become leisure addicts and reading would surely cease. The same was said of the radio in the 1920s, and of television in the 1950s. And at later dates, rock-and-roll, premarital sex, and the jet ski would be cited as literacy destroyers. Let’s not forget that critics also wailed and gnashed their teeth when parchment replaced papyrus, and when Gutenberg printed the first Bible.

The books of our childhood offer a vivid door to our own past, and not necessarily for the stories we read there, but for the memories of where we were and who we were when we were reading them; to remember a book is to remember the child who read that book.

How curious to come upon a previous owner’s name on the inside cover of used books, even more so if that reader has added marginalia—“too depressing!” “love this,” “what?” Who was this other person who inadvertently shared with me the pleasures of this imagined world? Or the story that’s found in the romantic dedication on the flyleaf—“Dear Bobolink, may you always cherish this book and have me next to you when you open it, love, Cliff.” Whatever happened to Bobolink and Cliff anyway, what went wrong?”

Other Blog Reviews:
A Striped Armchair
somewhere i have never travelled
A Garden Carried in the Pocket
Blogging ‘bout Books
You Can Never Have Too Many Books (first essay)
My Cosy Book Nook
where troubles melt like lemon drops
Puss Reboots

(Let me know if I missed yours.)