Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops Quotes

“It should go without saying that anyone who introduces themselves as 'a bit weird' is almost certainly not.”
― Shaun Bythell, Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops

“It never fails to baffle me that someone could be bored in a bookshop, with the possible exception of someone who can’t read, which pretty much excludes all adults.”
― Shaun Bythell, Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops

“I ought also to apologise for perpetuating stereotypes, when in reality people are far more nuanced and exist in endless subtle shades of characteristics. Generalisations are unfair, but so is life. Suck it up.”
― Shaun Bythell, Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops

“The kindness of strangers can reduce you to your knees in a sobbing mess faster than a well-aimed punch to the solar plexus.”
― Shaun Bythell, Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops

“This group derives an alternate sort of gratification from the fact that their niche obsession somehow differentiates them from other people, mistakenly assuming that it makes them more interesting.”
― Shaun Bythell, Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops

“McEwan, Julian Barnes and other giants of our age be elevated into literary immortality or almost forgotten? It’s impossible to know how kindly time will judge any of us. Will J. K. Rowling or Margaret Atwood become the Jane Austen of our times or end up as footnotes in a literary journal? Will Donna Tartt’s extraordinary, epic novels be read with the same reverence as Tolstoy, Homer and Hardy? Who knows whether the genius of Alan Bennett’s astute social observations will still be as relevant when viewed through the lens of a reader a century from now?”
― Shaun Bythell, Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops

“These abominable creatures have only one redeeming feature, and that is that they believe that books are cool, in the same way that they believe that vinyl, tweed and beards are cool.”
― Shaun Bythell, Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops

“The female of this species can be roughly divided into two types: indoors and outdoors. Both are utterly terrifying. Neither generally wears pantalon rouge, but there is unquestionably a uniform. I’m not sufficiently au fait with it to know who makes it, but they must have made a fortune out of it as it appears to be a mandatory sartorial requirement. It’s a sort of green tartan waistcoat, made from the hardiest of tweed. It looks like the sort of thing that’s tough enough to drag through a hedge backwards without damaging a single stitch. It is invariably accompanied by a waxed jacket (Barbour). The outdoor female pantalon rouge wears, without exception, trousers that she has almost certainly knitted herself with the wool from the pelt of a long extinct species of mammal which has been hanging on the wall of her ancestral home for several hundred years; they are sufficiently coarse that they could comfortably exfoliate a rhinoceros. Every item of her clothing is of a colour that might have been designed with no other purpose than to disguise mud, a material of which she maintains a permanent film.”
― Shaun Bythell, Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops

“Type Three Species: qui in parvam domum moverunt (downsizers) This is not a species you’ll find in shops that sell new books, but they appear on a daily basis in second-hand bookshops, trying to convince you that their tatty old Reader’s Digest Book of the Car is worth a fortune, or that their Miller’s Antiques Prices Guide for 1978 is a really significant milestone in English literature. Because property is relatively cheap”
― Shaun Bythell, Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops

“It's not as though there is anything wrong with being American, although perhaps in a land of immigrants the only way to differentiate yourself is to cling onto a piece of the land you left, even if it is several generations behind you.”
― Shaun Bythell, Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops