It’s appropriate that on the occasion of City Lights’ 70th anniversary, their longtime bookbuyer, Paul Yamazaki, should share his thoughts in the form of this slim volume.  It’s also appropriate that he chose to do so via the first publication of a new house, Ode an imprint of the Seminary Co-op Bookstores in partnership with Prickly Paradigm press whose mission is to “explore various aspects of book spaces and the book industry, and to publish ruminations on the intellectual, emotional, and aesthetic pleasures of reading.”  They were certainly successful in this initial foray.

The book takes the form of several interviews with Yamazaki who joined the famed San Francisco bookstore in 1970 after an undistinguished career as a student and after holding a number of odd jobs.  He quickly rose through the ranks becoming the store’s chief buyer and soul over the last 55 years.  Yamazaki distinguished himself by supporting minority authors and presses and by featuring books which larger and more conventional stores would have shunned.  You would never find a bestseller on the shelves of this bookstore!

Much of the book was of limited interest and felt like ‘inside baseball’ for the bookseller’s trade, but there were some sentences that resonated deeply for me.  In some ways, Yamazaki’s goals for the bookstore mirror mine for this web site.  He identified curiosity as the primary characteristic of a good bookbuyer and reader and went on to say that his role was to “bring the reader a new door to a new room to an environment where there’s a framwork for naviating the enormous world of books.”   The “real goal is to guide our readers to a more expansive horizon….where there is a possibity of joy.”

And that is why I only occasionally review a best seller while urging you, my readers to dive into John McPhee, Georges Simenon, Saul Bellow, Louis Jenkins, and the others that you won’t find in the pages of the New York Times Book Review.  Curiosity, joy, navigation, expanding horizon…..all core values of EpsteinReads and Paul Yamazaki!