A review by psheehy
The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop: A Memoir, a History by Lewis Buzbee

5.0

A beautiful book through and through, right down to its deckle-edged pages. And what better place to start than with this tiny book's pages, heavy and yellowed, and its inside cover, shining a bright sunshine canary like, well, a yellow-lighted bookshop on a foggy San Francisco afternoon. The book itself is a pleasure just to hold. But who cares what the book feels like? Oh, dear reader, that's exactly the point. This is Lewis Buzbee's love poem to books—real, tangible books—and everything about The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop has been given due attention. Buzbee's prose is fluid and playful, his paragraphs tidy and well-constructed. The research is thorough: It doesn't matter how much of a bibliophile you are, you will learn something. About bookmaking, or book-selling, or book-buying, or simply book-reading. Most important, the narrative is a splendid mix of memoir and history, and there's never too much of either, because too much of either would be too much indeed. Sure, The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop is not for everyone, but Buzbee readily admits that: "The literary culture within any society—those who cherish books, who read, write, publish, and sell them—has always been a small community." But for those living within that small community—and even some living without—there will be no putting it down. In the end, Buzbee offers more than just a history lesson on the evolution of the bookshop and these things we call books. He invites the reader to share in his joy for reading, a contagious energy that's near impossible to ignore. Simply put, this book makes you want to read, and read, and read. Isn't that what it's all about?