The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop

Here's another marvelous book for all of us book maniacs to read about our obsession. This one gets you into the back room of a bookstore. Buzbee knows the business inside out, having worked at selling books pretty much his entire adult life (when not reading or writing). The book alternates between Buzbee's musing on his own experiences with books, to the history and origins of books, to speculation about what might happen in the future. [The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop] was written ten years ago, before the e-book "caught on" but he is right that the medium has not been as popular as the purveyors had hoped. But he did predict the unpredictable and I would say the rise of the audiobook fulfills the surprise factor. Buzbee loves to show more speculate and he comes up with some great ideas: Books that get kids to read:"books of engagement"! There are many more gems of that kind. A great read! ***** show less

Pleasant and interesting until just past the middle when it went more into the business and less into history and memoir when it flattened out for me as if the author were more checking off the boxes he had to cover. Also, considering how much e-Books and Amazon in general has taken over the world, strongly nostalgic. It is sad to hear of all those no-longer-bookstores.

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 show more 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. show less

I almost had to fight with Buzbee in the first chapter of this book. He describes bookstores as places to go to browse (no objection yet), even to sit down and read (no particular objection here either), and to look for particular pieces of information. Wait! Here I object: isn't that what the library is for? Of course, I have my biases (being a librarian) and he has his (being a bookseller).

Having moved on from the first chapter, I was glad I did. I found this a delightful book. It truly is both a history and a memoir. More than that, it is both a personal memoir, and a memoir of bookselling as a profession. He tells his own story alongside that of the history of bookselling, and makes both very interesting.

He includes one statistic show more that I find distressing, though. He tells us that at an average of one book a week (roughly my own pace, depending on the book, and the week) from the age of 5 to the age of 80, a person will read 3,900 books or a little over one-tenth of one percent of the books currently in print. Far too few, if you ask me. show less

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 show more 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! show less

With the title and cover, I anticipated that the author had somewhere along a coast opened an enticing "Yellow-Lighted Bookshop."

Even without fulfilling that expectation, he offers one of those rare books where a reader might pause midway through the first chapter
and read from the start again just to savor the words.

He makes a powerful statement against government, or any, censorship.
My sole objection to this was finding a book in the children's section of
a bookstore in Madison, Wisconsin that showed two identical pigs (I think).
One was pink and the other was brown.

The pink one was labeled "Clean" and the brown one "Dirty."

Hello!?! to the editor who allowed this to be published.

The other odd things are his many mentions of show more illustrations,
none of which are included, the boring slowdown of plot "On the Road,"
and his glossing over stealing, books, test answers, etc. show less

A sparkling treat of a book - the kind that you just know, after a page or two, that you will treasure forever. With its neat hardback format and thick creamy pages, it even looks right.

Buzbee combines everything bookish here, beginning with his own 'calling' to the world of books, at 15, reading 'The Grapes of Wrath' at school, and moving through his time as a bookseller and publishing sales rep to his current role as reader, writer and compulsive book buyer. On top of the autobiographical elements, Buzbee traces the history of the book and bookselling, from papyrus scrolls to roadside stalls, through developing bookshops, censorship and printing to the e-commerce of today. To cap it off there is a wealth of personal insight, from the show more author's favourite bookshops across the globe, lovingly evoked and fairly evaluated, to the simple joys of books - their texture and smell, the pleasure of admiring shelves and stacks of books, the slow contentment of coffee and browsing...

A magical little tome, definitely worth not only reading, but buying, rereading and passing down to the next generation of bibliophiles. show less