Review: The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop by Lewis Buzbee

Buzbee spent many years as a bookseller and publisher's sales rep so he would appear to be uniquely suited to writing a book about bookstores labelled both a memoir and a history. Unfortunately, the latter overwhelms the former at almost every turn so instead of a history peppered with personal anecdotes about working in a bookstore, especially the colorful independents where Buzbee spent so much time, this is instead mostly a timeline of the emergence and growth of the bookstore, from the beginnings of libraries with their illuminated manuscripts to scribes to the printing press to stall holders and onward. While this could be interesting itself, it wasn't really enough to sustain the book. As a former bookstore employee myself, I know just how much Buzbee missed mining in a very fertile field when he chose to make this less personal and more generic. And while there were a few chosen bits about his obsessive love of reading and words here, overall, it was a much drier and slower read than I had anticipated. In poking around the internet, I seem to be in a minority in my feelings on this book but I just didn't see the charm and delight that other reviewers felt in reading this. Mostly I found it lackluster and was disappointed that I already knew all of the history that it presented.