A "Must Read" for Book-Lovers!

books:


	• The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop Lewis Buzbee Graywolf Press, 2006 - 180 pages average customer review:based on 26 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Books and Bookshops

Lewis Buzbee's celebration of the bookstore springs from his observation that 90 percent of people who buy books still leave home to do their shopping in a bookstore. These are the people who know they could more easily buy the book they are searching for by clicking their mouse around Amazon's website, but they cannot resist the lure of a real bookstore. There is just something special about being surrounded by books and other people who, to one degree or another, feel the same as we about books. As Buzbee says, even if we do not actually speak to other shoppers, they are part of the experience of shopping for books and they can often accidentally lead us to a book we would have otherwise missed.

The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop is a combination memoir and book/bookstore history. Along the way, Buzbee explains the evolution of the book from rare hand-copied pages affordable only to the wealthy upper class to mass produced paperbacks that sometimes sell in the millions of copies. He does the same for the bookseller, a calling that for many feels like a vocation they were destined for from birth. Buzbee's has been a life centered around his love for books, and the memories he shares of his days working in bookstores and as a publisher's sales rep are the heart of The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop.

Not surprisingly, Buzbee's focus is on independent bookstores rather than on the big chains which, along with Amazon, dominate the bookselling business today and he emphasizes just how difficult a business it can be for bookstores, authors and publishers alike. Avid readers often moan about the cost of new books but Buzbee provides the numbers that explain where the money goes: bookstores can receive as much as a 45 percent markdown on the cover price, the publisher gets about 35 percent of the price, the printer about 12 percent, and the author maybe 8 percent. That means that each hardcover sold puts about $2 in the author's pockets, an amount that he or she probably shares with an agent. Keeping in mind that most books are published in numbers of less than 10,000 copies, it is easy to see that few authors will become millionaires from the proceeds of their books. And though it might appear that the bookstore's cut is an inappropriately high percentage of the money generated, Buzbee points out that an independent bookstore with gross sales between one and two million dollars will be lucky to net more than $100,000 for the year. Bookselling is not a high margin business for anyone involved.

The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop is filled with stories and thoughts that will intrigue and delight book lovers, those readers who are always drawn to books about books. We are an optimistic lot when it comes to the future of books and bookstores although we do tend to get a little nervous when we read of the closings of so many independent bookstores and the supposed pending death of the publishing industry as we know it today. Buzbee has heard all the "gloom and doom" talk and he closes his book with this reminder: "It is important to remember that the death of literature, of a literary 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 literary destroyers. Let's not forget that critics also wailed and gnashed their teeth when parchment replaced papyrus, and when Gutenberg printed his first Bible."

Buzbee's writing style is a little dry at times but his little book has a lot to offer to the booklovers amongst us.

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Charming

Although the act of reading can be considered a solitary act, Buzbee describes how the book lovers among us share an unspoken bond in our book ventures. From the excitement of receiving a new Scholastic booklist to the feeling of browsing through unexplored novels in a bookshop, Buzbee has captured the essence of what it is like to be in love with books. Unlike many other nonfiction books, the interesting historical tidbits were just that, interesting.

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A "Must Read" for Book-Lovers!

Are you a bibliophile who salivates when entering a book store or library? Then this is a "must-read" book for you. Author Lewis Buzbee began his love affair with books as a schoolboy, carefully ordering his 25¢ Weekly Reader selections (remember those?). As a young teen Buzbee harangued the management of his hometown book shop until they finally caved and gave him a job as a shelver. Thus began a career that led to working as a publishing rep and later as an author. Filled with historical anecdotes of the history of bookmaking, bookselling, and marketing--from papyrus to POD books--Buzbee weaves personal essays throughout the text. Toward the end of the book Buzbee shares info on unusual bookshops, from the One Book Bookstore in Arizona to the large independent bookstores that contain miles and millions of books. He relates: "In Montpelier, Vermont, I recently visited Bear Pond Books. What first struck me about Bear Pond were the two signs hanging near the front entrance, each with an arrow pointing to a different half of the store; one sign said Facts, the other Truth, and I'll let you figure out which was for Fiction and which was for Home Repair."

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Book love

Slight personal history of the bookstore, and Buzbee's involvement as a user, employee, and lover of the bookstore. Fun couple of hours that doesn't hurt, and makes the reader want to go shopping.

I was reminded of life-long habits formed around books

--the Grantsville, Maryland public library (in a converted bank, with books in the vault), where I first remember loving libraries.

--reading "Little Big Books", highly-colored kids books in cardboard covers like cheap adult fiction, but sized for kids.

--learning to read anywhere time allowed (hey, what else are you doing during those two minutes of toothbrushing?).

--used book stores in Washington, DC full of serious books.

--"Love in the Library", a Jimmy Buffett song that my wife and I both love and remember fondly.

Note that Buzbee mentions libraries, but specifically is writing about his love for the purchased book, a point I understand. But libraries still seem to me a great barometer of the general grace of God and the extent of civilization just for the fact that when I walk through the door, I can take home a near-unlimited selection of books that don't cost anything!

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

?I cannot remember when I read a book with such delight.? ?Paul Yamazaki, City Lights Bookstore
November, a dark, rainy Tuesday, late afternoon. This is my ideal time to be in a bookstore. The shortened light of the afternoon and the idleness and hush of the hour gather everything close, the shelves and the books and the few other customers who graze head-bent in the narrow aisles. I?ve come to find a book.
In The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop, Buzbee, a former bookseller and sales representative, celebrates the unique experience of the bookstore?the smell and touch of books, getting lost in the deep canyons of shelves, and the silent community of readers. He shares his passion for books, which began with ordering through The Weekly Reader in grade school. Interwoven throughout is a
fascinating historical account of the bookseller?s trade?from the great Alexandria library with an estimated one million papyrus scrolls to Sylvia Beach?s famous Paris bookstore, Shakespeare and Company, which led to the extraordinary effort to publish and sell James Joyce?s Ulysses during the 1920s. Rich with anecdotes, The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop is the perfect choice for those who relish the enduring pleasures of spending an afternoon finding just the right book.

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