Malnutrition of the reading faculty is a serious thing.
Let us prescribe for you. p13
A doctor is advertised by the bodies he cures. My business is advertised by the minds I stimulate. And let me tell you that the book business is different from other trades. People don't know they want books. I can see just by looking at you that your mind is ill for lack of books but you are blissfully unaware of it! People don't go to a bookseller until some serious mental accident or disease makes them aware of their danger. Then they come to here. p16
... future lies not merely in systematizing it as a trade. It lies in dignifying it as a profession. It is small use to jeer at the public for craving shoddy books, quack books, untrue books. Physician, cure thyself! Let the bookseller learn to know and revere good books, he will teach the customer. The hunger for good book is more general and more insistent than you would dream. But it is still in a way subconscious. People need books, but they don't know they need them. Generally they are not aware that the books they need are in existence. p17
Between ourselves, there is no such thing, abstractly, as a "good" book. A book is "good" only when it meets some human hunger or refutes some human error. A book that is good for me would very likely be punk for you. My pleasure is to prescribe books for such patients as drop in here and are willing to tell me their symptoms. Some people have let their reading faculties decay so that all I can do is hold a post mortem on them. But most are still open to treatment. There is no one so grateful as the man to whom you have given just the book his soul needed and he never knew it. No advertising on earth is as potent as a grateful customer. p17-18
The real book-lovers are generally among the humbler classes. A man who is impassioned with books has little time or patience to grow rich by concocting schemes for cozening his fellows. p19
Human beings pay very little attention to what is told them unless they know something about it already. p21
The life of a bookseller is very demoralizing to the intellect. He is surrounded by innumerable books; he cannot possibly read them all, he dips into one and picks up a scrap from another. His mind gradually fills itself with miscellaneous flotsam, with superficial opinions, with a thousand half-knowledges. Almost unconsciously he begins to rate literature according to what people ask for. p30
They (booksellers) are likely to be a little – shall we say – worn at the bindings, as becomes men who have forsaken worldly profit to pursue a noble calling ill rewarded in cash. p42
The honor of his (bookseller) profession should compel him to do all he can to spread the distribution of good stuff. p47
... but they (customers) really want good books—the poor souls don't know how to get them. p49
... bookselling is an impossible job for a man who loves literature. p51
"The works of a man, bury them under what guano-mountains and obscene owl-droppings you will, do not perish, cannot perish. What of Heroism, what of Eternal Light was in a Man and his Life, is with very great exactness added to the Eternities, remains forever a new divine portion of the Sum of Things." — Thomas Carlyle, Cromwell (1845) p53
If an assistant chef is so fond of good books that he has to steal them, the world is safe for democracy. p77
The human yearning for innocent pastime is a pathetic thing... It shows what a desperately grim thing life has become. p107
... if you let yourself think that you are satisfied with husks, you'll have no appetite left for the real grain. p108
To laugh at cheap jests is as base as to pray to cheap gods. p108
... the real Peace will be a long time coming. When you tear up all the fibers of civilization it's a slow job to knit things together again. p112
That's the terrible hypnotism of war, the brute mass-impulse, the pride and national spirit, the instinctive simplicity of men that makes them worship what is their own above everything else. p113
"A grain of glory mixed with humbleness
Cures both a fever and lethargickness." — George Herbert p114
Printer's ink has been running a race against gunpowder these many, many years. Ink is handicapped, in a way, because you can blow up a man with gunpowder in half a second, while it may take twenty years to blow him up with a book. But the gunpowder destroys itself along with its victim, while a book can keep on exploding for centuries. p115
... books contain the thoughts and dreams of men, their hopes and strivings and all their immortal parts. It's in books that most of us learn how splendidly worth-while life is. p115
~~~~~~~~~ the last page ~~~~~~~~~
The Bookstore
The bookstore is one of humanity's great engines, and one that we use very imperfectly. It is a queer fact that most of us still have the primitive habit of visiting bookshops chiefly to ask for some definite title. Aren't we ever going to leave anything to destiny, or to good luck, or to the happy suggestion of some wise bookseller?
"We have ready access, in the bookshop, one of the greatest instruments of civilization; and yet none of us—neither publisher, booksellers, nor customers—have yet learned more than an inkling of what that place can accomplish."
—From JOHN MISTLETOE, by Christopher Morley
In every bookstore, small or large, there are books we have not read; books which may have messages of unsuspected beauty or importance. They may be new books, they may be of yesterday, or of long ago.
The store where you found this volume exists in the hope of knowing—and learning—about books. There is no habit more valuable than that of dropping into a bookstore occasionally to look around—to look both inward and outward.
"We have what you need, though you may not know you need it."
