Reviews for The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop: A Memoir, a History

The average rating for The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop: A Memoir, a History based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-01-04 00:00:00 Charles Padgett "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 spent from 1985-1997 working in the book industry. I started with Publisher's Book Outlet in Phoenix, the farthest flung bookstore for the Southern based Anderson News Company. I harassed the manager every other day until she gave me a job out of exasperation. I had a vision of myself working in that particular store that wouldn't give me any peace either. Within 18 months I was the manager when she simply quit showing up to work. I made a call to Anderson to explain the situation and they hired me to be the store manager over the phone. I met this judge while working for PBO who was as crazy about books as I was. Whenever we would get in a new shipment of books I would give him a call and he would come down to help process the new books. He wanted first dibs and for the free labor I was happy to oblige. He was in the OSS during WW2 which predates the CIA. He was involved in the capture of Hermann Goring. As he said to me. "I laid hands on him." I was privileged to get the chance to meet people like him. When I moved to Tucson to go to the University of Arizona I took a job with Bookman's Used Books. I learned so much about life and books working the used book buying counter. Most of my best memories of working in the book biz come from that period of time. My last job for them was opening a new location for them in Mesa. I learned a lot of what I can do by doing that job. For a month I was getting by on four hours sleep a night and my wife was about ready to divorce me. Luckily for me she hung in there. I had a short stint as a remainder company rep with Roy P. Jensen out of New Jersey. My territory was everything West of Denver. I had a chance to meet John Dunning (he owned Old Algonquin Books) and had him sign my first of the terrific BOOKED TO DIE. I walked into almost every relevant bookstore in my territory including those in British Columbia and Calgary. I remember one evening after closing drinking really bad jug wine with a bookseller in San Diego while we negotiated how much I needed to pay for a first edition of Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey. I'm pretty sure he got to me. :-) "I am fatally attracted to all bookstores." I then ended my book career with Green Apple Books in San Francisco. I never made very much money, but I made enough to pay for my college, and of course, there was the discount on books. I was able to meet authors like Thomas McGuane, Mark Helprin, William Gibson, Paul Theroux, Salman Rushdie (He dodged in unannounced with bodyguards and signed our books and was gone before the pressure of his handshake faded from my hand.), Neal Stephenson, Ray Bradbury, James Lee Burke,etc. etc. etc. I also had the pleasure of working with the most intelligent, interesting people I've ever met. You might be starting to think this review is about me. It is difficult for me to separate myself from any book, but especially one about the book business. Lewis Buzbee certainly stirred up a lot of great memories for me with this book. I am convinced that this guy led a life of parallel existence to me. His stories about the book store life from complaining about RUDE customers to putting on awesome music after the store closes had me staring off into the distance wrapped in a gossamer of nostalgia. Working in a bookstore was the only job I've ever had where I really didn't want to go home. The employees hung out together after work, pooled money to buy food, and we talked A LOT about books. Buzbee weaves the history of the book, the bookstore, and of reading around his own personal memories of working in the book industry. Nobody does this like Nicholas Basbanes, but for a quick thumbnail sketch he did an excellent job of hitting the highlights. I personal would have loved more stories from his time working in bookstores, but then just the few he shared reminded me of my own stories. "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." Buzbee did bring up a great point that most readers begin with reading "junk". We don't start out with Grapes of Wrath or Moby Dick and probably if we did, we would never have become dedicated readers. I went from reading Hardy Boy Mysteries to Louis L'Amour. My Dad leased farm ground from a guy named John Quanz who used to escape from his harpy of a wife by spending the bulk of every day at a small house he owned on his family's original homestead. He would sit in a rocking chair, sipping whiskey, and reading L'Amour, Luke Short, Ray Hogan, Elmore Leonard and any other western he could get his hands on. When he finished reading them he would give them to me to read. I still have a soft spot for a good western. The moment though that I became a lifetime reader was when I read Treasure Island. I owe a real debt of gratitude to Robert Louis Stevenson for opening up the world of literature to me. "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." I would really like to hear what "junk gateway" books everyone read that started them on the road to being lifetime readers. If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit I also have a Facebook blogger page at:

Review # 2 was written on 2007-09-11 00:00:00 William Fenlon Every time I read about an author's account of books & reading, I now compare them with Anne Fadiman's book Ex Libris and they simply never live up to her work, an unfair assessment perhaps since I love Fadiman's book so much. However, this is a special book too. It's a seemingly effortless mesh of autobiography and biography and history of bookstores. He might not write the soaringly beautiful prose of Fadiman but he writes well and his focus is narrower and just as interesting; this is mostly about bookstores, in the present and their history. It was a cozy read. Not for the first time this book showed me that I missed my calling: working in a bookstore, or owning a bookstore and working in it. Seriously. I also now have an urge (despite the lack of disposable income I once enjoyed) to go and spend a larger hunk of my free time in bookstores and to find bookstores new to me, preferably in far flung areas when possible. The author is based in San Francisco, the city where I live, so I know virtually all of the local stores he mentions. I, now, even more, want to visit certain worldwide bookstores, especially the village of Hay-on-Wye in Wales, Powell's in Portland, Orgeon , the Strand in NYC and the Tattered Cover in Denver, the latter three being more reasonable goals, although if I ever get to take my England and Scotland dream trip, I'm determined to get to Hay-on-Wye on the same jaunt. Luckily, many of my dream vacation spots would allow me to include bookstore visits along with my some of my other passions of finding good vegan & vegetarian restaurants, visiting museums of all types, attending plays (something I rarely do at home,) and appreciating both the natural beauty and the history of a place. As with almost every treasured book I read (from children's picture books to text books and every book in-between) in its pages I found more books I want to read, including If on a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino. I love that the author is entranced with children's literature as well as books written for adults. Bookstores are the only stores I truly enjoy; I need to spend more time in them, and I really need to try to do some traveling, and include bookstore stops wherever I am. The author relates how big box warehouse stores, more than internet or chain bookstores, have competed to the detriment of independent bookstores. So, maybe I shouldn't feel as guilty about doing the vast majority of my book shopping on the internet? Nah, I should still feel guilty. Although most of my books now are borrowed library books, I resolve to purchase more of those I do buy at independent bookstores, my favorite stores. This small (but not slight) book with the lovely cover gets at least 4 ½ stars from me, and it was just the respite that I needed at this time. Also, I'd love to run into the author in his neighborhood bookstore, a neighborhood that's just across Golden Gate Park from mine.