I’ve just been reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance  by Robert M. Pirsig. Quite why it has taken me 35 years to get around to reading it, when over the years scores, perhaps hundreds, of copies have passed through my hands I don’t know.  Perhaps I was waiting for a nice hardback copy to appear, which is what this copy is. The third impression of the English edition, published by The Bodley Head in 1975.  Perhaps since you’re book people I should use the technical jargon and say it’s a casebound copy, but casebound must be an almost obsolete term nowadays. Anyway the book has biggish print that I can read comfortably. I generally need glasses to read with nowadays. One of these days I may get bifocals and peer over them like a proper bookseller. One good thing about growing older is that you begin to look like people imagine an old bookseller should look. It’s much harder to bluff your way in this business when you’re 28. … more

The first time I ventured into an antiquarian bookstore I was about 17 years old.  I’d heard about such places from reading Morley’s The Haunted Bookshop & Parnassus on Wheels —bonus selections from the Book-of-the-Month club that my parents belonged to while I was growing up in Gloversville (NY), a town of less than 25,000 people with two book & stationery stores—an out-dated business model that disappeared along with buggy whip making, bespoke umbrella shops, and the like. (I’m sure we’ll get an earful from the buggy whip and bespoke umbrella people, as well as any surviving book & stationery stores) … more

Not long ago in these pages I reflected on rereading several novels by Sinclair Lewis that I admired in my youth and admire still.  That they are “dated ,” like Bach and my old flame Tallulah Bankhead (whom I met more than once but never actually dated), increases the pleasure I take in their manifest excellence.  My friend who is a retired professor of English tweaks me for the respect I have for Lewis’s Babbitt and Main Street , pointing out that (unlike Carol Kennicott but perhaps not unlike Tallulah Bankhead) “today’s women graduates appear to have been marinated in testosterone for four years.  And the businessman of my acquaintance [unlike Babbit] is no rube.  He is slick enough to give the impression of culture to the uncultured.”   That this professor (calling Lewis’s work “good only,” like a used book) is absolutely right about today’s college girl and today’s businessman only reinforces my idea that Lewis had them  pegged—perhaps originally so—almost a hundred years ago: they have not changed in essence, despite their changes in appearance and stature. … more

Not so long ago I crawled out on a limb and suggested “the threat of an ‘ugly deflation’ that worries some economists wouldn’t be a bad thing if prices on goods and services declined more or less uniformly...”  It’s not the deflation by itself that’s ugly—its uneven nature tends to bother mainstream economists because it rewards savers and punishes consumers and businesses who have have borrowed more than they should (probably a good thing), while monopolies continue doing whatever they like. … more

There was, perhaps, no one thing that explained the rise of the West: it was a complex series of events—perhaps, most notably, the growing idea that authority could and should be questioned.  The invention of the printing press made literacy more than simply the privilege of the clergy and nobility.  The Reformation challenged the power of the Vatican.  The Renaissance encouraged art and and provided a better climate for scientific investigation.  Great intellects began to speculate about the nature of the universe and the mindlessness of the age came under serious attack (and still is).  Warfare was still the sport of kings and princes but expanding technology helped to introduce new efficiencies into the business of killing people. … more

In many ways traditional bookselling and publishing have been anticipating economic trouble long before the markets and the general public became involved. … more

In an article datelined 31 August 2008, The Washington Post carried a small article from the AP briefly describing the comments of a Pakistani parliamentarian, Israr Ullah Zehri, speaking to his outraged colleagues. What made it interesting was that Zehri defended the actions of his constituents in Baluchistan who had shot and then buried alive five women. Their crime was that they wanted to choose their own husbands.  According to Zehri, “These are centuries-old traditions and I will continue to defend them.”  In the longer AP account, the reporter also noted that two other women were murdered because they had sympathized with the five other victims… … more

I attend fewer book fairs these days but Albany (NY) is only a two-hour drive from here and it provides a wonderful excuse for a Sunday drive in early November—as long as road conditions are good. For the past three years we’ve been lucky—good driving weather, plenty of free parking in downtown Albany and all of it on a pleasant Sunday afternoon. … more

One thing you have to make your mind up about, when you own a bookstore, is whether or not to stock books in foreign languages. In my case, you’d think the decision would be easy. I’m a linguist by temperament and by training, and had, by the age of twenty, achieved some proficiency in two dead, and three living, Mediterranean languages. In addition, I am a native speaker of English, though by a happy chance, as a wee bairn, I also spoke Scottish. Not the Gaelic but the Doric, the Scottish vernacular, as in  “wee bairn” (small child) and  “Lang may yer lum reek, laddie” which loosely rendered means “Good luck and good health” but literally translated means “Long may your chimney smoke, young man.” (If you’ve ever grappled with the poems of Robert Burns all the weird words you can’t understand are the Doric). And for seven years I labored at the chalk face, in secondary schools, attempting to coax foreign languages into, and out of, adolescent skulls. … more

The story you may have seen in the New York Times this past August about the theft of musical manuscripts from Israel’s national library had its beginnings when Jude and John Lubrano (J & J Lubrano Music Antiquarians) were researching some material they had purchased on eBay from Meir Bizanski, a Haifa architect. … more