Lewis Buzbee - The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop: A Memoir, a History

A Memoir, a History

LEWIS BUZBEE

Graywolf Press

Copyright 2006 by Lewis Buzbee

Publication of this volume is made possible in part by a grant provided by the Minnesota State Arts Board, through an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature; a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation Minnesota; and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, which believes that a great nation deserves great art. Significant support has also been provided by the Bush Foundation; Target; the McKnight Foundation; and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

Published by Graywolf Press
250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401
All rights reserved.

www.graywolfpress.org

Published in the United States of America

Excerpts from this book originally appeared in ZYZZYVA and
Switchback.

Cloth Edition: ISBN 978-1-55597-450-3
Paperback Edition: ISBN 978-1-55597-510-4
E-book Edition: ISBN 978-1-55597-000-0

Library of Congress Control Number: 2008928254

Cover design: Christa Schoenbrodt, Studio Haus

Cover art: Quint Buchholz
Sanssouci im Carl Hanser Verlag
Mnchen Wien 1997

for my mother and father

I think that I still have it in my heart someday to paint a bookshop with the front yellow and pink in the eveninglike a light in the midst of the darkness.

Vincent van Gogh

The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop

Alone among Others

W hen I walk into a bookstore, any bookstore, first thing in the morning, Im flooded with a sense of hushed excitement. I shouldnt feel this way. Ive spent most of my adult life working in bookstores, either as a bookseller or a publishers sales rep, and even though I no longer work in the business, as an incurable reader I find myself in a bookstore at least five times a week. Shouldnt I be blas about it all by now? In the quiet of such a morning, however, the stores displays stacked squarely and its shelves tidy and promising, I know that this is no mere shop. When a bookstore opens its doors, the rest of the world enters, too, the days weather and the days news, the streams of customers, and of course the boxes of books and the many other worlds they containbooks of facts and truths, books newly written and those first read centuries before, books of great relevance and of absolute banality. Standing in the middle of this confluence, I cant help but feel the possibility of the universe unfolding a little, once upon a time.

Im not here just to buy a new book, though. Much of my excitement at being in a bookstore comes from the place itself, the understanding that I can stay here for as long as need be. The unspoken rules weve developed for the bookstore are quite different from the rules that govern other retail enterprises. While the bookstore is most often privately held, it honors a public claim on its time and space. It is not a big-box store where one buys closets of toilet paper or enough Tabasco sauce for the apocalypse; nor is it a tony boutique that sells prestige in the shape of sequined dresses or rare gems; and its no convenience store either, raided for a six-pack, cigarettes, and a Nutty Buddy on the way home from a hard day at work. The cash registers chime does not define how long we can linger. A bookstore is for hanging out. Often for hours. Perhaps Ive come to crib a recipe from a cookbook or hunt down the name of that Art Deco hotel in San Antonio or even reread one of my favorite short stories. I might browse covers awhile after meeting up with a friend, the two of us chatting about our lives. Or I can sit down in History and read the first chapter of a charming treatise on the complex language of hand gestures in high Renaissance Naples. As you might be reading right now, taking your own sweet time. If theres a caf, all the better; a piece of cake and a cup of coffee, and time can run loose all over the place. I might even buy a book.

Imagine going into a department store, trying on a new jacket and walking around in it for half an hour, maybe coming back the following Wednesday to try it on again, with no real intention of buying it. Go into a pizzeria and see if you might sample a slice; youre pretty hungry, so you taste a bit of the pepperoni, the sausage, the artichoke and pineapple, and theyre delicious but not quite what youre looking for that day. In other retail shops, the clerks and management are much less forgiving of those customers who would consume without paying.

Part of the allowable leisure in a bookstore comes from the product it sells. Books are slow. They require time; they are written slowly, published slowly, and read slowly. A four-hundred-page novel might take years to write, longer to publish, and even after the novel is purchased, the reader can expect to spend hours with it at one sitting over a number of days, weeks, sometimes months.

But its not just the nature of the book that determines the bookstores permissiveness. The modern bookstore has long been associated with the coffeehouse and the caf. In eighteenth-century Europe, when coffee and tobacco conquered the continent, the coffeehouse provided a public gathering place for writers, editors, and publishers. The stimulant coffee and the sedative tobacco, in combination, made sitting at a table all day a pleasant equilibrium, perfect for writing, reading, long conversations, or staring out the window. This was the Age of Enlightenment: literacy was on the rise, books were cheaper and more abundant, and bookstores were often adjacent to coffeehouses, the customers of one were the customers of the other, with plenty of time in both for conversation and thought. Even today, the largest corporate chain stores, always mindful of the bottom line, build spaces friendly to the savor of time, with cafs and couches and study tables.

Books connect us with others, but that connection is created in solitude, one reader in one chair hearing one writer, what John Irving refers to as one genius speaking to another. Its simple to order books on-line, over the phone, or via catalogue and wait for the delivery man to scurry away before we open the door. But 90 percent of us who buy books still get out of the house and go to the bookstore, to be among the books, yes, but also to be among other book buyers, the like-minded, even if we might never say a word to them. Elias Canetti has described cafs as places we go to be alone among others, and Ive always felt this was true of the bookstore, too. Its a lovely combination, this solitude and gathering, almost as if the bookstore were the antidote for what it sold.