I worked in a bookstore in Oslo, importing the English-language books.
The thing that happened with the music business, there are no stores anymore where you can buy music. It’s all an online business now, and that’s, you know – the bookstore culture is a very vibrant part of the American experience that we’re very reluctant to see go away.
I do a lot of research. For ‘I Am Legend’, I did a lot of research about survivors. If everybody is dead around you, how you can keep surviving. I went to the bookstore and found psychiatry books about survivors from the Holocaust.
I first got really interested in Noh in about 1977. There was an independent bookstore in Bloomington, Indiana where I was going to high school. It was a really nice place. There was a New Directions paperback. It was the Pound/Fenollosa book, ‘The Classic Noh Theatre of Japan.’
Early in my publishing career, someone told me I’d need to have five books in print before I could quit my job as a journalist. Turns out it was closer to 10 books. It also turns out that while it’s great to see my titles on bookstore shelves, my best customers are schools and libraries.
In a fit at the bookstore one day, I bought all my favourite composers’ biographies: Schubert, Massenet, Wolf. I’ve still not had a chance to read them; it breaks my heart. But when you travel so much, you just can’t take that many books with you.
In this time of the Internet and nonfiction, to be on an actual bookshelf in an actual bookstore is exciting in itself.
I can walk into a bookstore and hand over my credit card and they don’t know who the hell I am. Maybe that says something about bookstore clerks.
I’d park myself in the bookstore and read with one eye on everyone coming in. I remember reading a Robert Bly book of poetry.
It’s one thing for the people in the industry to know who you are, because they’ve heard about you earlier. I have friends calling me from the Christian bookstore because there’s a poster on the wall. It’s just weird.
What has always surprised me when I walk into a bookstore is the number of books that you can find that are written with certainty. The authors tell some story as though it’s true, but they don’t have any evidence that it is true!
If the White House could do more to tell parents that getting children reading is their business too, we’d see a big difference. Hollywood and the NBA or NFL could step in, too. In England they have an event called Book Day, where every child receives a pound to use at any bookstore.
I’ve been told there’s a special golden shelf, in the secret vault kept at the back of every bookstore in America, that contains the Bible, ‘War and Peace,’ and ‘Driving Mr. Albert.’
The most colorful section of a bookstore is the display of SF books, with art by people like Wayne Barlow, who is a terrific artist.
I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson’s poetry. I came back to my hotel, read 2,000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano.
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