PW Beyond the Book
James Patterson talks with PW about his latest nonfiction book, The Secret Lives of Booksellers and Librarians, in which he profiles his literary heroes.
In the popular imagination, librarians and booksellers are commonly seen as being mild-mannered introverts who lead quiet lives. What made you decide to take on this stereotype?
Reading may be a solitary act, but engaging with books and with readers is social. It takes confidence to select the books people will want to read. And it takes conviction to promote them—talking them up to store customers or library patrons or online and saying, “This is what you’re looking for. Trust me. I think you’re going to love this.” Then readers come back and say, “Okay, what else you got?”
In researching this book, were any of your own ideas about the work these people do upended?
I’ve been to hundreds and hundreds of libraries and bookstores, and I can tell you this: keeping these places going takes an unbelievable amount of effort. The general public does not appreciate how hard librarians and booksellers work. What’s also amazing is how they specialize. There are libraries that lend books by subscription, to students of the Holocaust, to prison populations. Many have unique approaches that aren’t widely known. Each library, each bookstore, is its own ecosystem fed by the stories they contain.
You say in the book that booksellers and librarians save lives. What’s your favorite example of this?
People often turn to books when they are facing a crossroads. A North Carolina bookseller tells of a widow who said: “This book club saved my life.” Then there’s the elementaryschool-age reader who inhaled the pages of a book, asking, “Doesn’t it smell great?” A Utah bookseller answered yes, all the while thinking, You’ve got such a great life ahead of you. A life that is filled with books.
What is “book joy” and how can we get more of it in our lives?
“Book Joy” is an expression coined by a librarian in northern Texas to describe that great feeling of matching readers with the books that will bring them the most happiness. It’s the feeling that was shared by so many booksellers and librarians, who told us that their favorite part of their jobs was putting the right book into the right hands at the right time— making the kind of match that inspired readers to come back again and again and again. To get more “book joy,” keep turning those pages.
The full interview appeared on Publishersweekly.com on January 22.