英語書籍：The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop（2）

英語書籍：The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop（2）ZT

=====TODAY'S BOOK=====================

THE YELLOW-LIGHTED BOOKSHOP
A Memoir, A History
by Lewis Buzbee (nonfiction)

Published by Graywolf Press
ISBN: 9781555975104
Copyright (c) 2006 by Lewis Buzbee
YELLOW (Part 2 of 5)
======================================

(continued from Monday)

Perhaps the bookstore isn't as mindful of time and space as other
retail shops because there isn't very much at stake. Most
booksellers go into the business because they love books, and they
have a natural leaning toward the mercantile life. Books are
inexpensive, with a markup over wholesale that's as low as the laws
of economics will traffic. Books are heavy and take up lots of
space, and because each title is unique and there are so many titles
a well-stocked bookstore requires, inventory and stocking create a
high payroll, so most booksellers don't get paid much over minimum
wage. Time may be money in the rest of the world, but not in the
bookstore. There's little money here, so we can all take our time.

The bookstore has always been a marketplace where the ideas of a
given period were traded, and so has played a formative role in the
shaping of public discourse. The bookstore is often a stronghold in
attacks against the rights of free speech. Under the aegis of Sylvia
Beach's Paris store, Shakespeare and Co., "Ulysses" was first
published, and without Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights,
Gin*****erg's "Howl" might have taken years to enter the literature;
these are only two of the most celebrated cases.

There is a fundamental democracy in the mass-produced book. For
example, "Don Quixote," one of the great achievements of Western
literature, is roughly the same price as the most tawdry celebrity
biography, maybe even a little cheaper since the nuisance of paying
the author has expired. And location has little effect on the price:
"Don Quixote" costs the same at the swankest New York City
carriage-trade shop as in the most windswept Kansas City strip mall.
Mass production in other commodities not only affects price, but
also affects quality. I expect a custom-made bass guitar that costs
several thousand dollars to sound and play better than my Fender
knockoff, which costs two hundred. A pristine copy of the first
Hogarth Press edition of Virginia Woolf's "The Waves" may be a
collector's dream, but a new paperback version of it is as beguiling
and compelling. The quality of her prose does not lessen with the
price or edition.

In the bookstore, the finest writing is as accessible as the most
forgettable, and both are accorded the same respect: here it is, is
there a reader who wants it? No matter the book, there's always
someone who does. A bookstore is as likely to carry Proust's "In
Search of Lost Time" as the newest book of cat cartoons, or books on
automobile repair, military history, self-help, computer
programming, or the evolution of microbes. There's something for
everybody.

And there's somebody for everything. The bookstore is not only for
the literary. Readers come with their particular obsessions to find
the information they seek: the price of antique coins, effective
weed eradication, the proper enclosures for small-scale pig farming.
Any good bookstore carries high and low.

The book is a uniquely durable object, one that can be fully enjoyed
without being damaged. A book doesn't require fuel, food, or
service; it isn't very messy and rarely makes noise. A book can be
read over and over, then passed on to friends, or resold at a garage
sale. A book will not crash or freeze and will still work when
filled with sand. Even if it falls into the bath, it can be dried
out, ironed if necessary, and then finished. Should the spine of a
book crack so badly the pages fall out, one simply has to gather
them before the wind blows them away and wrap with a rubber band.

Most important in the democratic nature of the book, is that aside
from basic literacy, books require no special training to operate.

The invitation of the bookstore occurs on so many levels that it
seems we "must" take our time. We peruse the shelves, weaving around
the other customers, feeling a cold gust of rain from the open door,
not really knowing what we want. Then there! on that heaped table,
or hidden on the lowest, dustiest shelf, we stumble on it. A common
thing, this volume. There may be five thousand copies of this
particular book in the world, or fifty thousand, or half a
million, all exactly alike, but this one is as rare as if it had
been made solely for us. We open to the first page, and the universe
unfolds, "once upon a time."


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. There's a clerk at the counter who
stares out the front window, taking a breather before the evening
rush. I've come to find a book.

For the last several days I've had the sudden and general urge to
buy a new book. I've stopped off at a few bookstores around the
city, and while I've looked at hundreds and hundreds of books in
that time, I have not found the one book that will satisfy my urge.
It's not as if I don't have anything to read; there's a tower of
perfectly good unread books next to my bed, not to mention the
shelves of books in the living room I've been meaning to reread. I
find myself, maddeningly, hungry for the next one, as yet unknown. I
no longer try to analyze this hunger; I capitulated long ago to the
book lust that's afflicted me most of my life. I know enough about
the course of the disease to know I'll discover something soon.

(continued on Wednesday)

====ABOUT THE AUTHOR==================

Lewis Buzbee is the author of "Fliegelman's Desire" and "After the
Gold Rush." He lives in San Francisco with his wife and daughter.

所有跟帖： 

• was 倒數第二段 a duplicate? -任我為- ♂ (572 bytes) () 09/05/2009 postreply 08:02:27

• Why do you think so? -婉蕠- ♀ (2111 bytes) () 09/05/2009 postreply 08:35:24

• you are right. 我看進去了，忘了引和正文。 -任我為- ♂ (0 bytes) () 09/06/2009 postreply 10:12:28