OVERBOOKED

One of the fringe benefits of the Wisconsin Book Festival is that local bookstores order up the titles of the fest’s featured authors.

So even if you didn’t peruse the program, even if you didn’t catch any sessions, simple browsing even weeks after the fact might lead you to a book you’d otherwise never have tumbled upon.

That’s how I picked up The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop: A Memoir, A History by Lewis Buzbee (Graywolf Press) while hanging around the tables at A Room of One’s Own. As a book about books, it seemed a fitting title to launch this column.

The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop is one of those cuddly, nearly square paperback with a gatefold cover that mimics the wraparound book jacket of a hardcover. For some reason, this is a combo that book lovers can’t resist. It’s a biological fact.

Lewis Buzbee, a lifelong bookseller in California, sings the praises not so much of individual books but the experience of being in a bookstore. Particularly really good bookstores, the kind that fell off the map with frequency during the 1990s. Buzbee feels that the independents that made it through the 1990s have figured out how to hang on (although, of course, that was written before the economic crash of this September). He writes The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop from a plateau, where some sort of equilibrium had been reached between the threatened independents and the expanding chains.

Don’t get the idea the book is a whiny polemic. It’s upbeat, a sweet read that nudges you to get back to reading after spending too much time on, say, Facebook. It’s more about the sensual aspects of finding books, the whole zeitgeist, not individual titles. It’s a casual history of bookselling from the beginning, back to stalls in the marketplace in Alexandria. It’s the story of how we got to the point where society sustained fabulous bookstores with thousands of titles, and where we may go from here.

Buzbee confesses:

I am promiscuous when it comes to bookstores. Every bookstore, from the most opulent Parisian emporium to the anonymous strip-mall shop in Tucson, offers its own surprises. Since the bookstore first beckoned me thirty years ago, I have been in thousands, as a customer, employee, sales rep, tourist. Each one has freely divulged its delights.

For the true lover of bookstores, there is no sense of right and wrong, cool or uncool. Although for many years I worked in independent bookstores and on their behalf as a sales rep and strongly believe they are an under-valued cultural institution, I cannot bring myself to draw a prohibition against chain stores....I am fatally attracted to all bookstores.

The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop got me thinking about some of the famous bookstores I’ve loved browsing in -- City Lights in San Francisco; the Grolier Poetry bookshop in Cambridge, Mass.; Prairie Lights in Iowa City. But just as satisfying, maybe even more satisfying in a way, is finding the very appealing shops that are, in comparison, in the middle of nowhere: Redbery Books in Cable, Wisconsin; Ocooch Books and Libations in Richland Center, for instance.

I found that The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop went well with the autumn leaves and a sunny Saturday afternoon spent reading on the porch, but it would also pair nicely with a roaring fire and a dog or cat on your lap.