Browse the World in Bookshops
edited by Henry Hitchings
(Pushkin Press, 2016)
Throughout my teens, bookshops served as places of furtive self-education.
Page 11.
A bookshop can be a magnet for mavericks and nomads. A community hub, a haven, a platform for cultural events. A centre of dissent and radicalism. A place to disseminate notions too strange or explosive for mass circulation. A means of creating and nurturing coteries of readers.
Page 14.
There’s a common assumption today that, in order to thrive, bookshops need to be good at things other than selling books. Yet what I look for in a bookshop is still a passion for books themselves. Not a front-foot evangelizing passion, but the kind of ardour that expresses itself as a desire to have stock that other shops don’t have and to represent the world of books with sensitivity and conviction.
Page 17.
Virginia Woolf wrote that “Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.”
Page 18.
Whatever its size, a colony of second-hand books always has an evocative smell.
Page 18.
Every second-hand shop is an opportunity for a treasure hunt, and is crammed with stories, since every item on its shelves comes with extra layers of history - the traces of past owners, their scribbled marginalia and Post-it notes.
Page 18.
Discarded books are “repositories of the lives they’ve been so close to”, and a second-hand bookshop is a museum of special moments in those lives.
Page 19.
Lovers of bookshops can be much like pilgrims; sometimes a shop has a hallowed reputation, and we travel in the hope of a salvific moment.
Page 20.
The richest bookshop epiphanies have happened not in places t which we traipsed like pious seekers, but in ones we stumbled on.
Page 21.
“To own a certain book - one you had chosen yourself - was to define yourself.” More than that, it seems to me, to choose a book and take custody of it is a small enlargement of one’s self. Many of us cherish libraries, which are on the whole wonderfully democratic institutions and often the wellspring of ideas, but it is on our own bookshelves, packed with our purchases, that we find the archives of our desires, enthusiasms and madnesses.
Page 22.
When it comes to books, “it’s not enough to get what you already know you wanted. The best things are the things you never knew you wanted until you got them”.
Page 23.
Although bookshops are businesses, they are largely exempt from the widespread antipathy to commercialism, partly because they promote literacy and community, but also because they connect us to a past in which retail was less cutthroat and more idiosyncratic.
Page 24.
We leave ourselves in our books via this seeming detritus.
Page 30.
The smell of paperback ink and paper was its own intoxication.
Page 36.
Domestic libraries occupied a special place in the Soviet value system; consequently they were viewed as treasured heirlooms for the older generations to bequeath to their children and grandchildren, who were expected to value them as much as the family silver.
Page 44.
A person/s age is usually reflected in their voice.
Page 48.
I love second-hand bookshops. I love old books, the musty smell of them and the people who sell them. I love looking for something that I’m never going to find.
Page 50.
No one knows how a vocation manifests itself, or what paths destiny uses to appear to its victims.
Page 69.
Bookshops, for a writer, are places of transformation. When a writer is asked to choose his favourite bookshops, he won’t generally pick the one he most often visits, but rather the scenes that inspire his nostalgia: the nostalgia of starting out.
Page 71.
There is no fixed and sure method of turning a novice into a novelist.
Page 71.
This feeling of astonishment is something that certain bookshops give us.
Page 72.
I dare to advise people to write, because it’s like adding an extra room to the house of one’s life. There is life and there is thinking about life, which is another way of living it intensely.
Pages 72-73.
Literature was my homeland and I wanted to participate in that world.
Page 73.
The immediate satisfaction of online buying is no fun for me. Visiting several stores in search of a book, tracking it down and hunting for it like a difficult prey, continues to be one of the pleasures that is turning me, bit by bit, into an anachronistic bibliophile.
Page 78.
The best bookshops are meeting places, spaces for cultural exchanges and for belonging tothat mysterious world.
Page 79.
A good bookshop is a place we go into looking for a book and come out of with one we didn’t know existed.
Page 79.
On a website we cannot discover anything, we can’t bump into the unexpected book, because an algorithm predicts wheat we’re looking for and leads us - yes, mathematically - only to places we already know.
Page 80.
The best bookshops are places where the principle of serendipity, which in broad strokes consists of finding the book you need when you don’t yet know you need it, presents itself in all its splendour. A reader’s life is, among other things, this tissue of opportune coincidences.
Page 80.
His handshake was perfect. Not too firm, not too limp. It was obvious that I’d have to watch out. You don’t play games with people who have a perfect handshake.
Page 85.
All librarians, I sometimes think, are fairy godmothers in disguise.
Page 104.
All that offers a happy ending is a good fairy tale.
Page 108.
The small familiar touchstones of life do crumble into nothing.
Page 126.
I gape at the gap where the bookshop used to be, as if time might fall away and reveal the past intact.
Page 127.
This was the place to find the literature of becoming woman, being woman, yearning, failing, falling in love, falling out of love, seeking, desiring, losing, finding the world, losing the soul, travelling, returning, coming home, leaving home and giving meaning to life. … “They have moved” is better than “They have disappeared.”
Page 127.
“Book people, … We know them. They come into a bookshop to find themselves. Book people.”
Page 133.
A bookshop is a crucible of human habit. The character of a person - their loves, loathings, hopes and fears - can be discerned in the books they choose, their movement in and about the bookshop, and in their interactions with literature and also their book vendor.
Page 133.
“A book is not just a product; a book is an experience. To understand them you must have a feel for books.”
Page 138.
Bookshops are a casualty of the illusion of progress.
Page 139.
An important part of book buying comes from having a tactile connection with the pages.
Page 142.
In overwhelming abundance lies the possibility of overlooked treasure.
Page 150.
If forced to guess … I’d estimate that I own between 15,000 and 20,000 books, conceivably more. From many quite reasonable points of view I have “too many books”, but to my mind I just need more bookshelves. Or a bigger house.
Page 151.
I would argue that under most circumstances the conversation of used book dealers or obsessive collectors is the best conversation in the world
Pages 152-153.
Over the years I’ve also learned the prudence of sneaking any newly acquired treasures into the house as covertly as possible. There’s nothing like a baleful glare form one’s beloved spouse to ruin a god day’s booking.
Page 154.
As a boy, I could lose myself utterly in a book; now I seem to lose myself only in used bookstores.
Page 154.
My heart still leaps with childlike joy at the sight of row after row of old books on shelves.
Page 154.
A collector should always trust his or her instincts.
Page 156.
Books speak even when they are closed.
Page 174.
Books are alive and don’t like to be badly treated.
Page 176.
Books choose those who want to buy them.
Page 177.
“Mice don’t eat books for no reason. … When a mouse eats a book, it’s because the paper is of good quality, the mould on it is tasty, or else because the writing is excellent. Beware of books that the mice avoid!”
Page 178.
Books are so full of thoughts that some of them have learned to think.
Page 178.
There comes a time when your work is over and it starts to belong to other people.
Page 180.
Literature (and its shrine, the bookshop) is a breeding ground for ideas forged in the flames of creation and the fire of rewriting.
Page 181.
We become the person someone imagines we are.
Page 203.
We have the potential to become greater than the role we’ve been expected to play. To set this growth in motion requires affection and respect for the human being as a phenomenon - and the growth can be triggered by a bookseller’s interested and learned presence.
Page 203.
Most book pit proprietors, slumped at their desks, imagine themselves as writers. … Their pygmy kingdoms are book prisons, where they can take a leisurely revenge on volumes t5hey hate: the ones that refuse to escape.
Page 217.
There is such a powerful connection between the two trades: the honourable and altruistic profession of providing modestly priced reading matter to a hungry but diminishing demographic and the entitled, despised tribe of scribblers who cough out product.
Page 218.
A simple but essentially closed system was undone by the arrival of the internet; suddenly all the information was out there and desired titles were either impossible or available for the price of a postage stamp. At a stroke, a subculture governed by gossip, rumour, superstition and bad juju, was undone.
Page 220.
Writers, attached to the myth of heroic modernism, collected books and texts, to excuse themselves from the trouble of writing them.
Page 221.
It is often a shocking thing to encounter a bookshop troglodyte in the open air.
Page 237.
Occupations flourish and fade. It is the characters, the frustrated rock stars and authors of memoirs, who bring place to life. Who provide jobbing writers with their inspiration.
Page 229.
Yu don’t become besotted only with people, but also with printed works or abstract ideas.
Page 236.
Confusion was, and still is, what we Turks do best.
Page 240.
Although the streets and the public squares belonged to men, especially after sunset the soul of Constantinopolis was that of a woman refusing to age.
Page 240.