The estimable Harvard/MIT/Yale representative, Patricia Nelson, writes this week:
What’s a day without a bookstore? We cherish you all as wonderful retreats, browsing heavens, the perfect place to meet, the perfect date, the perfect outing with children, a wonderful daily oasis, a welcoming place of solitude, a magic theater of words, a generous place of discussion and shared passions, a constantly surprising calendar of authors and ideas, a communitarian center, a place of democracy in action.
The Guardian UK has been posting favorite bookstores for years, may I echo the sentiments of the Guardian’s Jeremy Mercer saying:
“Bookstores are sanctuaries. Places to lose yourself, escape the harsh demands of daily life, find new ways to dream and new sources of inspiration. I love all booksellers; anybody who helps spread the word is doing noble work. But my favourite bookstores are the small eccentric independents run by passionate and usually slightly mad book lovers.”
Dear Patricia,
As you know, I have become excited by Robert Richardson’s splendid little book, First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process, published by the University of Iowa Press. In his NYRB review John Banville starts:
“Surely mankind’s greatest invention is the sentence.”
Your sentence above is magnificent. Long ago in 1963, I had a job selling California/Cornell/Harvard/Johns Hopkins/MIT/Princeton/Yale books to bookstores in Asia, from Beirut to Kyoto. I saw hundreds of wonderful bookstores and wrote about them to the publishers back home. Those letters launched me on a publishing career at Princeton and Berkeley.
It occurs to me that you might, in the manner of Emerson, be keeping a journal – a gathering of good sentences – about your travels to bookstores in America today and that it might make a fine little book.
Bill