from The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop by Lewis Buzbee:
“What Greta was trying to tell me that night, and ever since, was that the books are right, we are not alone” (25).
“When Greta and I were first working together, I was a sophomore in college — both literally and figuratively– and i used to wonder aloud how I’d been selected out of all my family to be one who was going to … the one who was obviously .. well, what exactly I didn’t know, only that it was better. My parents only read, I’d tell Greta, lesser literature. While I had become .. elevated, enlightened? My preening finally wore Greta out, and one day she called me on it. We were standing in the middle of the store, alphabetizing a section that had been ignored for a while, probably Business” (31).
“One of the earliest records of a bookseller is found in a hieroglyphic tomb inscription from the classical era of the Egyptian pharaohs, where it’s noted that one undertaker has expanded his business by offering for sale to the grieving family his own edition of The book of the Dead” (50).
“Of somewhat varying sizes, books are the same basic shape, slim rectangular blocks that can be easily stood one next to the other two flat surfaces pushed together, each balanced at a ninety-degree angle to another flat surface: hence shelves of books. Imagine how much more difficult to line up a shelf of cantaloupes” (69).
“In the early days of the Tower [Records and Books], when Russ [Solomon] did the majority of the buying for both the record and bookstores, he would reach across his desk with a pair of scissors and snip off the tie of any sales rep who hadn’t yet learned the lesson” (87).
“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 of the shelves rather the customer [sic]. Most books would lack covers (title pages, however, were now 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” (103).
“It is important to remember that the death of literature, of a literate culture, is not an idea that 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 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” (214).
