Wednesday, November 30, 2005

 

Welcome to Sarah's Books

I own and operate a small used-and-rare bookshop in Maine, and will be posting here from time to time with bookish news both from the shop and from the world at large. I'll also be commenting on what I've been reading lately - I've usually got three or four books going at once and at least one of those is bound to be in the genre of my favorite bookshop shelf tag: Books About Books. In this profession I'm lucky enough to see books from many centuries, so I won't be confining my reading recommendations to the present day.

Right now, for example, I'm in the middle of a sweetheart of a book entitled Book Shops: How to Run Them by Ruth Brown Park, Doubleday, Doran Book Shops, Inc., 1929. I bought this at an antiquarian bookfair last year and am just getting around to reading it. And I'm halfway through The Book That Changed My Life: Interviews with National Book Award Winners and Finalists edited by Diane Osen, The Modern Library, 2002, which I picked up last week for a few dollars at a nearby library's booksale room.

In the first, Ruth Brown Park describes the ideal bookshop as "a place where books are harbored tenderly; understood intelligently and passed on discriminatingly." (p.57)

In the introduction to the Diane Osen book, Neil Baldwin mentions that Ms. Osen has read all of Trollope. (p.xii)

How delicious. Both are bookish to the nth degree and make me ridiculously happy. And they are giving me a break from my major reading project of the fall/winter: The Diary of Samuel Pepys - the University of California edition. I had almost finished with volume IV when several other books derailed me (the above included). I fully intend to return to Pepys any day now. I have the best of intentions, I swear...

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