Quotes from Lewis Buzbee

How do you press a wildflower into the pages of an e-book?

My bookstore obsession grew to the point where I'd search for new shops during family trips, as though that were the reason for our travel.

The books of our childhood offer a vivid door to our own pasts, and not necessarily for the stories we read there, but for the memories of where we were and who we were when we were reading them; to remember a book is to remember the child who read that book.

If you read one book a week, starting at the age of 5, and live to be 80, you will have read a grand total of 3,900 books, a little over one-tenth of 1 percent of the books currently in print.

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.

November, a dark, rainy Tuesday 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.

I am fatally attracted to all bookstores.

Maturity and experience shouldn't stop one from craving silly things like sliding down bannisters.

A bran' new book is a beautiful thing, all promise and fresh pages, the neatly squared spine, the brisk sense of a journey beginning. But a well-worn book also has its pleasures, the soft caress and give of the paper's edges, the comfort, like an old shawl, of an oft-read story.

I've had many more thousands of books in my possession than my shelves at home would indicate. At one time, I tried to keep them all, but that quest soon became impossible; I now only keep the ones I'm sure I'm going to reread, the ones I'm definitely going to read before I die, and the ones I can't bear to part with because of an aesthetic or emotional attachment.

Books, I knew then and now, give body to our ideas and imaginations, make them flesh in the world; a bookstore is the city where our fleshed-out inner selves reside.

Books were in the world; the world was in books.

We are much more likely to be drawn to a messy bookstore than a neat one because the mess signifies vitality. We are not drawn to a bookstore because of tasteful, Finnish shelves in gunmetal gray mesh, each one displaying three carefully chosen, color-coordinated covers. Clutter -- orderly clutter, if possible -- is what we expect. Like a city. It's not quite a city unless there's more than enough.

For those who are afflicted with book lust, those for whom reading is more than information or escape, the road to our passion is quite simple, paved merely by the presence of the printed matter. It's a common story; fill in your own blanks: I was -- years old when I happened on a novel called --, and within six months I had read every other book by the writer known as --.

Even a paperback printed on acidic paper, whose pages have yellowed ten years on, can still be read, no matter how badly the spine is cracked or how inflated it's become from being dropped in the bathtub. The pages might separate from the spine, but a rubber band can keep them together. You may loan a book to your circle of closest friends, but shoes are another matter. A great book will never go out of style - books go with every outfit.

Watching a scene from a film in slow motion is possible, but there's an unreal air to it; reading a passage from a book slowly does nothing to rob the words of their power. A film presents images; a book creates images inside the reader, with the reader's active participation. Books are good for your brain.

It is with the common book that most readers will spend their head-tilted hours. from The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop

The technology of the book is much more flexible than film, more user friendly. The reader can dip into the book at will, without electricity, and is always aware of where she is in the book, halfway through, a third of the way, mere pages from the end, her fingers helping to measure the excitement of coming to the conclusion.

A film presents images; a book creates them inside the reader, with the reader's active participation. Books are good for your brain. Neurologists have found that, when watching television or film, the viewer's eyes remain idle, straight ahead, but when reading, the actual physical movement of scanning the page from left to right (or right to left, or up and down, depending) stimulates and conditions the brain, a Stairmaster of the mind.

Americans...publish more books than any other country, but the per capita figure is surprisingly low. Of the English-speaking nations, the United States comes in fifth, behind the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. The United Kingdom publishes 2,336 books per person, the United States 545.

Books are slow. They require time; they are written slowly, published slowly, and read slowly.

The bookstore and the coffeehouse are natural allies; Neither has a time limit, slowness is encouraged.

Rereading a favorite novel first read 5, 10, or 20 years ago, is a measure of our travel, how far we've come; it's a way of visiting an earlier self.

If you read one book a week, starting at the age of 5, and live to be 80, you will have read a grand total of 3,900 books, a little over one-tenth of 1 percent of the books currently in print.