Bookshops Quotes

“The stories I have discussed, which might be taken to be about reading and memory, are in fact explorations of the relationship between memory and forgetfulness. A relationship expressed through objects, volumes that are containers, the result of a kind of handicraft we call books that we read as remnants, as ruins of the texture of the past, of their ideas that survive. Because it is the fate of what is whole to be reduced to parts, to fragments, chaotic lists and examples that are still legible." - Jorge Carrión, Bookshops: A Reader's History”
― Jorge Carrión, Bookshops: A Reader's History

“Every bookshop is a condensed version of the world. It is not a flight path, but rather the corridor between bookshelves that unites your country and its language with vast regions that speak other languages. It is not an international frontier you must cross but a footstep--a mere footstep--you must take to change topography, toponyms and time: a volume first published in 1976 sits next to one launched yesterday, which has just arrived; a monograph on prehistoric migrations cohabits with a study of the megalopolis in the twentieth-first century; the complete works of Camus precede those of Cervantes (it is in that unique, reduced space where the line by J.V. Foix rings truest: "The new excites and the old seduces"). It is not a main road, but rather a set of stairs, perhaps a threshold, maybe not even that: turn and it is what links one genre to another, a discipline or obsession to an often complementary opposite; Greek drama to great North American novels, microbiology to photography, Far Eastern history to bestsellers about the Far West, Hindu poetry to chronicles of the Indies, entomology to chaos theory." - Jorge Carrión, Bookshops: A Reader's History”
― Jorge Carrión, Bookshops: A Reader's History

“All booksellers who suffered Francoist censorship, police persecution, and fascist bomb attacks were marked for ever by this period and have always believed that a bookshop is more than just a business. We picked up the torch from the last man executed by the Inquisition, a bookseller from Córdoba who was condemned in the nineteenth century for introducing books banned by the Church. And this period made it quite clear, once again, that that reflex action dictatorships have of burning books is no coincidence but the product of two incompatible realities. And it also clearly demonstrated how important independent bookshops are as instruments of democracy." - Jorge Carrión (quoting Francisco Puche), Bookshops: A Reader's History”
― Jorge Carrión, Bookshops: A Reader's History