I long ago ran out of bookshelf space and so, like a museum with its art, simply rotate my books from the boxes to the shelves and back again.

I am something of an aficionado of thrift stores. In my youth, I regularly searched their shelves for old books.

What I enjoy about reviewing and writing for newspapers and periodicals is simply the chance to talk about all kinds of books and lots of them.

Most scholarly books we read for the information or insight they contain. But some we return to simply for the pleasure of the author's company.

If you have enough book space, I don't want to talk to you.

My urge at Christmas time or Hanukkah-time or Kwanzaa-time is that people go to bookstores: that they walk around bookstores and look at the shelves. Go to look for authors that they've loved in the past and see what else those authors have written.