For my third installment in the ooos, I would like to feature two books by revisiting 002. After all, I may not be in such a friendly territory (books about the book/book collecting) for awhile depending where Books by the Numbers wanders next. Both books could be classed at 381 with other forms of commerce (they are both about book selling), but I think they will find their readers better among works about the book, and so they have been kept at 002.
The first, a shorter book, is the charming The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop : a Memoir, a History (002 BU) by Lewis Buzbee. It is truly a book lover's delight. Here, in 200 small pages, Buzbee offers a paean to the bookseller's trade. He details his career working in progressively larger bookstores in California in his young adulthood and his career as a sales rep for a publisher. All of this is intertwined with vignettes on the history of the book and book selling throughout. What emerges from the efficient prose is a concise, yet comprehensive treatise on how the profession of book seller has evolved over the century and on the rapidly changing nature of the business during the last quarter century.
It is also interesting to note a connection with the subject matter some of the other books featured in this division. The place Buzbee cuts his teeth in his first bookstores was Palo Alto, California, which was a very central location in the development of the PC. Indeed, one of the big successes of Printers Inc., Buzbee's most fondly remembered bookstores, was their extensive and timely collection of computer books when the boom hit.
The second book, Old Books, Rare Friends (002 RO), was written by two women, Leona Rostenberg and Madeleine Stern who enjoyed an extraordinary friendship of almost 70 years, and who had been in business for around 50 years together as dealers in antiquarian and rare books. What has set their careers apart from others in the trade, aside from their longevity and enduring--and it is noted platonic--friendship, has been their propensity for literary detective work, "sleuthing," as they are fond of referring to it.
The bit of sleuthing that made the duo famous was there discovery that Louisa May Alcott, well known author of Little Women (JF AL) and other classic children's books also wrote under the pseudonym A. M. Barnard a number of lurid "blood-and-thunder" tales. The library holds one volume of these collected stories, Behind a Mask: the Unknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott (F AL).
Between the two books, I think The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop has a more broad appeal, though both have appeal to book lovers. Old Books, Rare Friends might turn some people off because the writing style of the two ladies is more of a turn-of-the-20th century style. Still, for me, this makes for a meatier bone and all the more timeless, but you need to consider who is writing this blog. After all, Leona is quoted in Old Books, Rare Friends as having said: "To librarians, booksellers, and collectors there is nothing limited in the subject of Books about Books."
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