If you love books, and you find yourself in San Francisco, your first stop must always be City Lights Bookstore. The legendary shop, located in the city’s famed North Beach neighborhood, has been a beacon of books, politics, and progressive ideas since it opened in 1953.
Paul Yamazaki, author of the new book Reading the Room: A Bookseller’s Tale, has sold books at City Lights for more than half a century, the last 40 years as its principal buyer. To put it succinctly, Yamazaki is a Moby Dick-sized fish in the small pond of the bookselling world. Here are just a few words booksellers and writers have used to describe him: demi-god, superhero, larger than life. Rick Simonson, another legendary bookseller with Elliott Bay Books in Seattle, writes in the introduction to the book “Paul Yamazaki carries the immensity and humility of being human with an integrity, passion, purpose, and radiant spirit that is rare among us.”
Yes, Yamazaki is a titan. He is as celebrated among booksellers as the shop he has represented for more than 50 years is among book lovers. To reward his long career of book advocacy, in 2023, Paul was awarded the National Book Foundation’s Literarian Award for lifetime achievement and service to the literary community.
Back in the day, even before Yamazaki worked there, City Lights was also a publisher. The store became synonymous with the Beat poets and writers of the 1950s. Howl and Other Poems, by Allen Ginsberg, published in 1956, is likely the most well-known volume the store published. Even if you don’t know the book or the poem, chances are you’re familiar with the title poem’s iconic first line: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.”
It’s perhaps also poetic, then, that Yamazaki is publishing this book, his first, with a new imprint created by a bookstore. Reading the Room: A Bookseller’s Tale is the first title for Ode Books, a collaboration between Chicago’s Seminary Co-op Bookstores and Prickly Paradigm Press.
This slim volume, easily a one-sitting read, is a distillation of several conversations between Seminary Co-op booksellers and Yamazaki. The book brings to light his philosophy on book buying, bookselling, politics, activism, and a wide array of other topics, from his personal history to whiskey. (“Drinking covers at least two major themes that I’d like to underline: generosity and dialogue,” he quips.)
The book is a must-read not only for booksellers, but also for anyone who loves books. Have you ever wondered about why some books make it onto the shelves, while others are passed over? Have you ever walked into a bookstore, seen a display, and pondered how a bookseller decided on those specific books to showcase?
Here, Yamazaki provides the answers to these questions in a way only he could. For him, books are about forging conversation and connection: “Any single book has a constellation of conversations, consequences, and causes,” Yamazaki says. The important point, though, is that those connections and conversations must be both between the books themselves as well as between a book and that book’s perfect reader. “When they’re placed side by side, (books) talk to one another. Our goal when you walk in is to make sure that, right away, you see books you haven’t seen in any other spaces and to see books you know in a slightly disorienting way.”
Any bookseller worth their salt will immediately stand and cheer at this idea. And any reader who has ever loved a previously unknown-to-them book they plucked off a display is probably thinking, “Wow, that makes a ton of sense.”
“The worst thing we can do as booksellers is underestimate the reader,” says Yamazaki. Later, he continues: “Our role as booksellers is to take readers to places they didn’t expect to end up.”
If Reading the Room has a fault, it’s that it’ll leave readers wanting more. Yamazaki is way too classy to dish on terrible customer experiences or spill the tea on what books celebrity shoppers have purchased, both of which would’ve been all-too-easy ways to beef up this book. And there is some autobiography, including some great details about his parents, how he hated school as a kid, and his burgeoning activism as a young man. But when you read between the lines of these little anecdotes, like how he went straight from jail to work at the bookstore, you know the man has much more to tell. Stories that would shock and amaze. Stories that would make your hair stand on end. But we’re a little short on those here.
Still, there’s plenty in Reading the Room to create a satisfying reading experience, albeit a short one. Yamazaki is a hall-of-fame name dropper, often of obscure writers or old-timers in the publishing industry. When you’re able to pick up what Yamazaki is putting down, you feel like you’re part of the best bookish clique. Reading this book made me proud to be a bookseller, but even more proud to be a lover of books.
NONFICTION
Reading the Room: A Bookseller’s Tale
By Paul Yamazaki
Ode Books
Publication date: May 8, 2024
