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Quote by Gary Goodman

“Okay, so I know I’m not the last bookseller. People still sell books. But I’m one of the last of a certain kind of bookseller. The kind that for six hundred years rooted around basements, book bins, and bookstores looking for, sometimes, rare books or, more often, secondhand books. They were the hunter-gatherers of the book business, the travelers and pick-ers, who spent their lives saving books that might otherwise have been lost. They are, now, nearly extinct, driven to ground by the machines—the cell phones, personal computers, and, especially, the internet—that replaced them at the end of the twentieth century.”

Quote by Gary Goodman

Work

The Last Bookseller: A Life in the Rare Book Trade

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Gary Goodman

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“I had no songs in my repertoire for commercial radio anyway. Songs about debauched bootleggers, mothers that drowned their own children, Cadillacs that only got five miles to the gallon, floods, union hall fires, darkness and cadavers at the bottom of rivers weren't for radiophiles. There was nothing easygoing about the folk songs I sang. They weren't friendly or ripe with mellowness. They didn't come gently to the shore. I guess you could say they weren't commercial. Not only that, my style was too erratic and hard to pigeonhole for the radio, and songs, to me, were more important that just light entertainment. They were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality, some different republic, some liberated republic. Greil Marcus, the music historian, would some thirty years later call it "the invisible republic." Whatever the case, it wasn't that I was anti-popular culture or anything and I had no ambitions to stir things up. i just thought of popular culture as lame as hell and a big trick. It was like the unbroken sea of frost that lay outside the window and you had to have awkward footgear to walk on it. I didn't know what age of history we were in nor what the truth of it was. Nobody bothered with that. If you told the truth, that was all well and good and if you told the un-truth, well, that's still well and good. Folk songs taught me that.”

“There is a secret place. A radiant sanctuary. As real as your own kitchen. More real than that. Constructed of the purest elements. Overflowing with the ten thousand beautiful things. Worlds within worlds. Forests, rivers. Velvet coverlets thrown over featherbeds, fountains bubbling beneath a canopy of stars. Bountiful forests, universal libraries. A wine cellar offering an intoxi cation so sweet you will never be sober again. A clarity so complete you will never again forget. This magnificent refuge is inside you. Enter. Shatter the darkness that shrouds the doorway… Believe the incredible truth that the Beloved has chosen for his dwelling place the core of your own being because that is the single most beautiful place in all of creation.”

“Speranza si incupì sotto lo sguardo delle nipotine, le sopracciglia bianche si incontrarono al centro della fronte e la luce aranciata dell’abat-jour marcava le rughe come trincee nere, creava ombre scure nell’incavo degli occhi e sotto il mento. «Sa Filonzana» disse. «La Filatrice» chiarì subito dopo, a beneficio delle bambine. [...] «Lei fila il destino della gente» continuò. «E lo interrompe, se deve. Zac! Taglia il filo» spiegò, mimando un paio di forbici con le dita, quasi volesse giocare a Carta-Forbici-Sasso. «Come le Parche» osservò Elena, dall’alto dei suoi dieci anni di saggezza.”

“[...] e fu allora che Elena notò il tatuaggio sul collo: sotto l’orecchio appariva un cerchio diviso in quattro parti da due linee incrociate. Ogni quarto era riempito da righe che formavano un diverso motivo, a volte più strette, altre più larghe, ondulate o riempite da puntini. Una pintadera, il timbro con cui fin dall’età nuragica si usava marchiare il pane per portarlo al forno comune o colorarsi il corpo, per segnare l’appartenenza a una precisa famiglia. Il simbolo, diverso per ogni casa, era sopravvissuto tra i cacciatori per riconoscersi tra loro come facenti parte di un’unica gilda, pur facendo parte di ceppi differenti.”