McMenamin 3
Discussion Handout
Lewis Buzbee’s The Yellow- Lighted Book Shop
Introduction: Lewis Buzbee’s The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop, published in 2006 by Graywolf Press, is both a heart felt memoir of Buzbee’s life in bookstores, and a history of book selling spanning 3000 years. Buzbee’s memoir intertwines his own ardent love of books and his personal experiences of working in bookstores for over three decades with the history of books, book selling, and the evolution of the bookstore as we know it today. The Yellow- Lighted Bookshop not only underscores the importance of “literary culture” (Buzbee 215) in our society, but also raises several important issues surrounding the future of books, reading, and the importance of bookstores.
I. Buzbee illustrates the “mortar and brick bookstore” as a social space that creates a sense of place and community. The bookstore is both important to our culture of democracy as well as unique in comparison to other retail businesses:
· “The modern bookstore has long been associated with the coffeehouse and the café” (Buzbee 5), thus “a bookstore is for hanging out” (Buzbee 4).
· “90 percent of us who buy books still get out of the house and go to the bookstore to be among the books,” and to be among other book buyers, the like-minded, even if we might never say a word to them”(Buzbee 6).
· “The bookstore is still the place where we may engage in the free and unrestricted congress of ideas” (Buzbee 215).
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II. As Buzbee laments the overall decline in independent bookstores due to outside forces such as technology and competitive business practices such as, for example, predatory pricing, he underscores some of the obvious and not so obvious effects that these forces have on the cultural of literacy.
· “the biggest change in bookselling since the advent of big business is the loss of characters” …”today’s bookstores are mostly without notoriety, without edge” (Buzbee 127).
· “as publishers come to rely on mass merchandisers for significant portions of their revenues, they pay more attention to the titles those outlets sell” (Buzbee 209).
· while “the internet accounts for 10 percent of book sales today, increasing every year, the biggest loss of market share has been to mass-merchandisers, so-called big box stores-price clubs, Costcos, Wal-Marts, etc.—especially in children’s books” (Buzbee 200).
III. “how do you press a wildflower into the pages of an e-book?” (Buzbee 202). The internet’s role in the culture of literacy- “The future of our literary culture remains a heated issue, and the reports if you can believe them, are rather gloomy. The book is dead; the novel is dead, literacy is dead, the computer has triumphed” (Buzbee 214).
· “Despite these predictions, we’re publishing more books than ever, and while there is a good deal being published that we probably won’t be reading fifty or even five years from now, this has always been the case” ( Buzbee 214).
· Although consumer resistance is still strong, and “we may not be able to curl up in that e-chair” Buzbee points out that internet does have certain advantages. Technical and academic reference works, medical manuals, comprehensive dictionaries, and journals “highlighting the most recent advances in any given field—can be produced far more cheaply and updated instantly” (Buzbee 202).
· POD technology – an environmentally sound concept.
· The internet/ electronic bookstores as “a source of information, first researching books on the internet, then ordering them from a “brick and mortar shop” (Buzbee 205).
IV “Today there is a serious assault on the ability of bookstores and their customers to traffic freely in ideas and books” (Buzbee 215).
· “I am Salman Rushdie” (Buzbee 149).
· Section # 215 of the Patriot Act”…gives F.B.I the ability to obtain subpoenas and go through records of customer purchases. The F.B.I. can do the same with libraries…” (Buzbee 171).
· “Any time you use a credit card in a bookstore, or buy a book on-line or borrow a book from a library, the government can, without your knowledge, at any time and without stated cause, read over your shoulder” (Buzbee 172).
V. Buzbee posits: “Reading is a solitary act, but one that demands a connection to the world” (Buzbee 46). What defines reading and how does reading define us?
· “Neurologists have found that, when watching television or film, the viewers eyes remain idle, straight ahead, but when reading, the actual physical movement of scanning the page from left to right (or right to left, or up and down, depending) stimulates and conditions the brain, a Stairmaster of the mind” (Buzbee 132). Buzbee claims a stronger connection to a physical book because it offers a physical, sensual, solid journey.
· As part of the literary debate over books vs. internet reading one asks: “Online, R U Really Reading?” The internet has “created a new kind of reading, one that schools and society should not discount” (Rich, The New York Times. 27 Jul 2008).
· Because of the internet, we are moving away from our ‘patterns and habits of the printed page and toward a new world distinguished by its reliance on electronic communication" (Birkerts 118). Birkerts believes this will cause: 1. “language erosion.” 2. “Flattening of historical perspectives. 3. “the waning of the private self”. (Birkert 129-130).
Works Cited
Birkerts, Sven. The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in the Electronic Age. New
York: Ballantine Books. 1994. Print.
Buzbee, Lewis. The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop: a memoir, a history. St. Paul, Minnesota:
Graywolf Press. 2006. Print.
Rich, Motoko. Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading? The New York Times.
27 Jul. 2008. Web. 8 Sep. 2009.