Lewis Buzbee

So...when can I buy my own bookshop?

I loved this fun and inspiring memoir about the author's experiences in various roles as book "pusher". Many of his experiences and memories were fun and relatable---like the one about the Weekly Reader. I remember my teachers using them as a reward. If we got our stuff done, then she'd hand out those or the Scholastic flyers and we'd spend the last half hour of the day looking through them. I'd forgotten about that anticipated joy until reading his similar memories. He also shared a neat anecdote about booksellers setting up outside the walls of European cathedrals during Medieval times. One can still visit the bookseller set up within the campus of Winchester Cathedral---outside the main walls of the cathedral. Just be sure to have cash as he doesn't accept a card!

Many of the stories he shared were fun to imagine---like Hemingway's contact "Bernard B." who smuggled banned books into the US in a very interesting way or Sylvia Beach who outsmarted the Nazis who tried to confiscate the contents of her Paris bookstore.

It was fun to read about his favorite bookstores around the world. My favorite here in NW Arkansas is Once Upon a Time Books in Tontitown. There are others that offer a more romantic atmosphere for book hunting, but OUTB has a huge selection of antique hardbacks at excellent prices. I always find treasures when I go there. My favorite overseas bookstore is The Minster Gate bookshop in York, England. It's got several floors of books arranged by subject and they're even stacked on the rickety stairs! The ghosts of many hundreds of years permeates that building---I can't wait to go back!

I was surprised by some of the statistics he shared. For instance, I didn't agree with his claim that 90% of people still go to a brick and mortar store to shop for books. I think the ease and selection of sites like Amazon make for a much larger percentage than
I'm glad I got a hold of this fun little book...but it really did make me want to own my own bookshop!… (meer)

This delightful little book is part memoir, part history, and part gentle polemic. Buzbee started his career in the last great bookstore age, when the tech nerds busy creating the modern Internet depended on print books just as everybody else did. He seems (like me) always to have been in love with books: not just with particular books, or with the pleasures that reading books can bring, but with the very idea of books, not to mention with their feel, their look, their smell. He has much to share with other booklovers about how bookstores are run, and what it was to work in one (and is still, for a lucky few). Along the way he covers the history of books as we know them and of the vendors, stalls, and stores that sell them. Not surprisingly, he's worked not just as a bookstore employee but as a publisher's representative, and he has interesting stories about what that life is like, too.

I enjoyed every page of this book and read it very quickly. I'm sure that anybody who likes books at all would like it.… (meer)