Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir

by Anatole Broyard

To open a bookshop is one of the persistent romances, like living off the land or sailing around the world.

I realize that people still read books now and some people actually love them, but in 1946 in the Village our feelings about books—I’m talking about my friends and myself—went beyond love. It was as if we didn’t know where we ended and books began. Books were our weather, our environment, our clothing. We didn’t simply read books; we became them. We took them into ourselves and made them into our histories. While it would be easy to say that we escaped into books, it might be truer to say that books escaped into us. Books were to us what drugs were to young men in the sixties.

Those who were depressed by letting their books go tended to devaluate them, while others who were more in the hysterical mode asked such enormous sums that I knew it was their souls they were selling.