Bookshops Quotes

• If I'm feeling desperate, I'll go out image-hunting. I'll go to news agents and stand at the rack flicking through magazines or go to second-hand bookshops. And then, bit by bit, like concrete poetry, I start to realise that I am drawn to particular things, and then I start wondering why that is.

  

  Gary Hume
  • Poetry
  • Hunting
  • Desperate

• The coming of the printing press must have seemed as if it would turn the world upside down in the way it spread and, above all, democratized knowledge. Provide you could pay and read, what was on the shelves in the new bookshops was yours for the taking. The speed with which printing presses and their operators fanned out across Europe is extraordinary. From the single Mainz press of 1457, it took only twenty-three years to establish presses in 110 towns: 50 in Italy, 30 in Germany, 9 in France, 8 in Spain, 8 in Holland, 4 in England, and so on.

  

  James E. Burke
  • Knowledge
  • Establish
  • Printing press

• A perfect treat must include a trip to a second-hand bookshop.

  

  Virginia Woolf
  • Perfect
  • Hands
  • Healing

• So often, a visit to a bookshop has cheered me, and reminded me that there are good things in the world.

  

  Vincent Van Gogh
  • World
  • Things
  • Bookshops

• If your memory was OK you could descend upon on a bookshop – a big enough one so that the staff wouldn’t hassle a browser – and steal the contents of books by reading them. I drank down 1984 while loitering in the 'O' section of the giant Heffers store in Cambridge. When I was full I carried the slopping vessel of my attention carefully out of the shop.

  

  Francis Spufford
  • Attention
  • Reading
  • Memories

• I have no patience with up-themselves authors who complain about having to trail round a few bookshops signing stock.

  

  Nicholas Royle
  • Stock
  • Authors
  • Bookshops

• I am very happy in second-hand bookshops; would a gardener not be happy in a garden?

  

  Hilary Mantel
  • Hands
  • Garden
  • Gardener