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