"And yet, here I am. Fifty years old, irredeemably a bookseller, and more happy than if I’d…if I’d what? Well, than if I’d just about anything, I suppose. I’ll put it this way – if I were to win the lottery tomorrow, the only thing that would change would be the quality of my inventory. I just can’t imagine doing anything else. Even in those moments of blankest regret, when all the bills come due at once and my stock looks like it could have been chosen at random by a blind, crack-addicted three-year-old; when the office hasn’t been cleaned in a month and the coffee jitters set in because I forgot to eat my breakfast which is still sitting cold on the kitchen counter six hours later; when the phone rings and it’s some flea-market guy asking to “pick my brain” about a “real old book” he found buried in cowshit in his granddaddy’s barn; even when I get home after a house buy and realize that every book I just overpaid for smells irretrievably of cat piss…even then, I can only imagine one way forward: more books. And then, more books after that and, for dessert, more books. More books. More books. More books."

"But after living in smallish apartments for decades I just spent seven years in a house with a full-size attic, and everything went to hell. Books entered my house under cover of night, from the four winds, smuggled in by woodland creatures, and then they never left. Books collected on every surface; I believe that somehow they managed to breed." Yes, this.

"So, I recently discovered Stacked Up: Writers Show off their Shelves, which is exactly what it sounds like. Short interviews with writers and some of their books. Just wonderful, though a bit too NYCentric to be truly invigorating. I just don't get that worked up over THE BIG DEAL that is NYC. Give me space, keep your crowds! But, NYC is where a LOT of writers live, so I can't be too cranky about it. Hopefully the Stacked Up folks will one day be able to get off the little island and out into the real world. Anyway, go enjoy these things Book Folk-- you're not alone."

Your affectionate friend,

Tho. Bodley.

"For me it tends to be more a matter of finding the links between things. I need to fill out my knowledge of Prague, 1949, or the Elizabethan prose writers, or the cross-migration between New York newspapers and Hollywood in the '20s and '30s. I buy every book I see about Gypsies, and most firsthand accounts of vaudeville, and almost everything by lesser-known New Yorker writers of the old regime. I'm always on the lookout for memoirs -- frequently by the less-than-famous -- that supply concrete details of daily life, rather than simply lists of names or dates of parties or, heaven forfend, litanies of traumas. I like books published before 1940 that are illustrated with photographs; even if those are frequently small and murky, they are rare windows into the past. Books help me construct whole worlds in my mind, and I require an army of books to complete the picture, not that it's ever truly complete."

A good, old article turned up by Google. Although the "disappear" in the final para upsets me a little.

Praxis Series, Romantic Circles

"...How are such things as editions, states, variants, or even the book itself to be discussed? To what extent is a printed book singular? And to what extent does the (inaccurate) scholarly assumption that it is not, enable reasonable and useful discussion of such objects to proceed?"

"The hoax proved not to be a total loss for its victims. The catalog they had received itself became a highly coveted collector’s item. Within a few decades it had more than quadrupled in price."

What's most charming about this piece to me is the number of little details of book-reading that ring true -- like his ability to remember where on a page a quote is, or the fact that you often CAN tell a book by its cover. Bravo, Luc Sante.