The lure of bookstores

Below are some quotations about bookstores found in a Mardy Grothe’s Metaphors Be With You:

Alas! Where is human nature so weak as in a book-store! — Henry Ward Beecher

Henry Ward Beecher

Beecher obviously was talking about himself and other bibliophiles. For other people, their human nature may be weakest in clothing stores, music stores, hardware stores, candy shops, auto dealerships, jewelry stores or wherever. We’re not all put together the same way, but we each have our weaknesses.

As for me, I share the Beecher curse. Bookstores have the draw of Sirens. Ordinarily I have little patience for shopping. Get in and get out is my motto. In bookstores, however, I have patience until my legs give out. And sometimes it's not until my money runs out.

When I visit a new bookstore, I demand cleanliness, computer monitors, and rigorous alphabetization. When I visit a secondhand bookstore, I prefer indifferent housekeeping, sleeping cats, and sufficient organizational chaos to fuel my fantasies. — Anne Fadiman

Anne Fadiman

I understand perfectly what Fadiman is saying. I get annoyed in stores that sell new books when those books are on the wrong shelves or when authors in the fiction section are not in perfect alphabetical order. I certainly don't want to see books stacked on the floor. In secondhand stores, however, such things are more forgivable and, as Fadiman suggests, even desirable. The lack of perfect organization gives the suggestion that books have been coming into the shop faster than even the owner has been able to look through them all. Thus, or so we want to believe, there may very well be undiscovered treasures on those shelves and in those stacks and boxes.

Add a sleeping cat and you have heaven on earth.

Even an ice cream parlor — a definite advantage — does not alleviate the sorrow I feel for a town lacking a bookstore. — Natalie Goldberg

Sadly, most American towns, even some large enough to be called cities, now lack a bookstore. First because of superstores such as Barnes and Noble and, for a time, Borders, and later because of Amazon, small, independent stores have had difficulty surviving. Even secondhand books can be easier to find on the Web, if you know what you are looking for, so shops selling used books have trouble surviving, as well.

For those who live in such towns, ice cream parlors are small consolation.

A bookstore is one of the few places where all the cantankerous, conflicting, alluring voices of the world co-exist in peace and order, and the avid reader is as free as a person can be, because she is free to choose among them. — Jane Smiley

When I visited a bookstore earlier today I noticed on the magazine racks such publications as Free Inquiry, Reason, American Atheist, The Humanist, National Review and The New Republic all standing side by side in peaceful co-existence. The same thing was happening on shelves where books about politics and other controversial subjects were kept. In bookstores, as in libraries, differing points of view get along just fine. We are free to take what we want and read, then argue about it later.