395 Quotes About Book-lovers

Many of the people who came to us were of the kind who would be a nuisance anywhere but have special opportunities in a bookshop

Any bookseller will tell you that, even with 100,000 booksneatly sorted and shelved in a well-lit, warm shop, if you put an unopened box of books in a dark, cold, dimly lit corner, customers will be riffling through it in a matter of moments. The appeal of a box of unsorted, unpriced stock is extroidinary.

A life without books is like body without a soul.

there are always plenty of not quite certifiable lunatics walking the streets, and they tend to gravitate towards bookshops, because a bookshop is one of the few places where you can hang about for a long time without spending any money. In the end one gets to know these people almost at a glance. For all their big talk there is something moth-eaten and aimless about them.

there are two well-known types of pest by whom every second-hand bookshop is haunted. One is the decayed person smelling of old breadcrusts who comes every day, sometimes several times a day, and tries to sell you worthless books. The other is the person who orders large quantities of books for which he has not the smallest intention of paying.

...people still cling to the notion that first editions are somehow imbued with a magical and financial value.

Awomen spent ten minutes looking around the shop, then told me that she was a retired librarian. I suspect she thought this was some kind of a bond between us. Not so. On the whole, booksellers dislike librarians.

Dickens is one of those authors whom people are ‘always meaning to’ read, and, like the Bible, he is widely known at second hand. People know by hearsay that Bill Sikes was a burglar and that Mr Micawber had a bald head, just as they know by hearsay that Moses was found in a basket of bulrushes and saw the ‘back parts’ of the Lord.

In a second-hand bookshop head to the back, find the old books with dust undisturbed and worn off covers for these clothe true treasures.