Adventures in American Bookshops, Antique Stores and Auction Rooms

BOOK stores are the intellectual barometers of our cities. Show me where people buy their books and I will tell you what sort of life they lead. Book stores always were and are mirrors of the habits and intellectual preferences of men and women

Sure enough we read books, because we want to know what their authors have to say. But the author remains a stranger to us, the book once read is done with forever.

The written word, as it flows from the pen, has much of the inspiration, the mental process and the ideals of the writer; the typewritten word tells nothing

there is nothing new and original in this world that has not been written about by somebody years and years ago

Book stores, like mushrooms, never grow solitary

live from hand to mouth

Shelves all around the walls filled with a few thousand well-selected books, comfortable chairs to sit in here and there, a sacred case of first editions, all other books well dusted and in neat rows, modern authors mostly, scarce translations of authors whose names, perhaps, you have never heard before

There was a time when people really loved books and bought them in order to read. Then they had time to read.

“I don’t think they are all bad at heart. They simply don’t look at books as merchandise and if they can get something for nothing, they take it. Women are the worst. Especially those modern women who write and try to reform humanity. They are quite shameless and do anything as long as there is a slight chance of getting away with it.”

All people who stop out there to look at my books are thieves, and if I give them a chance to get away with my books they prefer to acquire them that way rather than to buy. They steal from earliest childhood and never cease until they are dead. I have been forty years in this very place and I know what I am talking about. And though I am as watchful as a dog, I lose about twenty per cent of the stock that I put in my stalls through thieving.