BookLove

If you have a fond childhood memory of books/ bookstores, you’ll enjoy the “Quotation of the Day” that I picked up from this morning’s Shelf Awareness (Daily Enlightenment for the Book Trade). Worth repeating, reprinting, even committing to memory:

As a child—an easily bored, semi-feral child without a TV—I spent a lot of time in the local bookstore. The store had a large children’s section, with rows and rows of chapter books that led out to a small café, but by the time I was eight or nine, I would peruse the stacks and come away with the distinct impression that I had read everything there. The only thing—or, rather, person—that stopped me from giving up and turning to some other sort of entertainment was the children’s bookseller, a short black-haired woman who had read everything and could, if I told her some books I liked, recommend a new one to me—inevitably a more obscure but equally good one—with seemingly magical accuracy, the way that other adults enjoy pulling quarters out of kids ears. It was astonishing.

Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn in her New Yorker Book Bench blog post, “The Trouble with Recommending Books”