Doug Walters

“We are a city that has had Islam for one thousand years. We had the greatest teachers and universities. And now these Bedouins, these illiterates, these ignoramuses, tell us how to wear our pants, and how to say our prayers, and how our wives should dress, as if they were the ones who invented the way?”
― Joshua Hammer, The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu and Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts

“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

“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

“At length he threw ‘A Midsummer Night's Dream’ aside, and opened the door to listen to the night outside, advancing cautiously down the steps into the cloistered quadrangle. Looking up from the stone enclosure, he could see the sky full of innumerable trembling stars, and all he could hear was extravagant sounds at a distance—drunken howling from a far street, something that might have been a revolver shot, and, from somewhere in the College itself, the hysterical crying of a jazz record. Close to all was quiet: the slightest of winds breathed over the grass and around the stone pillars, while from the Master's garden came the restless sound of trees. He wondered if a time would ever come when these things would assure him and seem pleasant.”
― Philip Larkin, Jill