Editorial Inspirations

“We don’t want bookstores to die. Authors need them, and so do neighborhoods. So let’s mount a book-buying splurge. Get your friends together, go to your local bookstore and have a book-buying party. Buy the rest of your Christmas presents, but that’s just for starters. Clear out the mysteries, wrap up the histories, beam up the science fiction! Round up the westerns, go crazy for self-help, say yes to the university press books! Get a load of those coffee-table books, fatten up on slim volumes of verse, and take a chance on romance! There will be birthdays in the next twelve months; books keep well; they’re easy to wrap: buy those books now. Buy replacements for any books looking raggedy on your shelves. Stockpile children’s books as gifts for friends who look like they may eventually give birth. Hold off on the flat-screen TV and the GPS (they’ll be cheaper after Christmas) and buy many, many books.”

–Roy Blount Jr.’s holiday message, posted at the Authors Guild website

“More than a building that houses books and data, the library has always been a window to a larger world–a place where we’ve always come to discover big ideas and profound concepts that help move the American story forward. . . .

“Libraries remind us that truth isn’t about who yells the loudest, but who has the right information. Because even as we’re the most religious of people, America’s innovative genius has always been preserved because we also have a deep faith in facts.

“And so the moment we persuade a child, any child, to cross that threshold into a library, we’ve changed their lives forever, and for the better. This is an enormous force for good.”

–President-elect Barack Obama in a speech at the American Library Association annual conference in June 2005

“Books, inherently, require faith. Faith in an author that he or she will reward the many hours you’ll spend in those pages, faith that a good story will be told, a lesson will be learned, a light will be shone upon a dim corner of the world. If you’re reading this magazine, with its vast and rich history of literary achievement, you’re alive to the pleasures of reading–for school or for no good reason at all. Now you have to give teenagers the benefit of the doubt, that they know what you know, that they do read and will read, that they will keep books alive, as alive as ever–that they will continue to pull the books from the shelves and add to those shelves books of their own.”

–Dave Eggers in Esquire magazine

“Science has proved that reading books activates brain cells and hundreds of people are book addicts and the Internet can not replace books as there is no continuity in reading something on Internet. At the same time, reading on the Internet requires electricity, which is a problem in Pakistan, and books have a longer life, so the Internet cannot replace books.”

–Dr. Muhammad Ali Muhammadi, a physician, quoted in the Daily Times about his love for the 40-year-old Sunday book market in Karachi, which “has no name” and consists of 50 “temporary roadside stalls, set up by spreading books out on sheets of cloth.”

“The book is warm. The book is handy. The book is handsome to the eye. The book occupies the shelf of the owner and is a reflection of him or her or, actually, me. The book is always there, to be reached for, to be thumbed and, too often I admit, to wonder about: Why did I buy this? My bookcase is full of mysteries. . . . I asked a bookseller in New York to recommend a brilliant but unheralded book, and he went through his shelves and picked out several, none of which I had ever heard of. Her Privates We was one of them. The Hemingway blurb sold me. No digital anything can do that.”

–Columnist Richard Cohen in the Washington Post.