The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop

When I walk into a bookstore, any bookstore, first thing in the morning, I'm flooded with a sense of hushed excitement. I shouldn't feel this way. I've spent most of my adult life working in bookstores, either as a bookseller or a publisher's sales rep, and even though I no longer work in the business, as an incurable reader I find myself in a bookstore at least five times a week. Shouldn't I be blase about it all by now? In the quiet of such mornings, however, the store's displays stacked squarely and its shelves tidy and promising, I know that this is no mere shop. When a bookstore opens its doors, the rest of the world enters, too, the day's weather and the day's news, the streams of customers, and of course the boxes of books and the many other worlds they contain - books of facts and truths, books newly written and those first read centuries before, books of great relevance and of absolute banality. Standing in the middle of this confluence, I cant help but feel the possibility of the universe unfolding a little, once upon a time.

This is the lovely opening paragraph of The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop, a memoir, a history by Lewis Buxbee. I have just unpacked it from a box of books from America. The sun is shining and I have just been told that our supermarket isn't going to arrive now until the end of August. Heigh ho.

Tap.