[NSD -10/11/02]WORTH THINKING ABOUT: YE OLDE BOOKSTORENow that just a few giant corporations dominate publishing, these comments by the English novelist and critic John Cowper Powys have a new poignancy:"Though books, as Milton says, may be the embalming of mighty spirits, they are also the resurrection of rebellious, reactionary, fantastical, and wicked spirits! In books dwell all the demons and all the angels of the human mind. It is for this reason that a bookshop—especially a second-hand bookshop—is an arsenal of explosives, an armory of revolutions, an opium den of reaction."And just because books are the repository of all the redemptions and damnations, all the sanities and insanities, of the divine anarchy of the soul, they are still, as they have always been, an object of suspicion to every kind of ruling authority."In a second-hand bookshop are the horns of the altar where all the outlawed thoughts of humanity can take refuge! Here, like desperate bandits, hide all the reckless progeny of our wild, dark, self-lacerating hearts. A bookshop is a powder-magazine, a dynamite-shed, a drugstore of poisons, a bar of intoxicants, a den of opiates, an island of sirens."Of all the 'houses of ill fame' which a tyrant, a bureaucrat, a propagandist, a moralist, a champion of law and order, an advocate of keeping people ignorant for their own good, hurries past with averted eyes or threatens with his minions, a bookshop is the most flagrant."See http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0912568178/qid=1034348910/news scancom/ref=nosim for the "Autobiography of John Cowper Powys—or look for it in your favorite library. (We donate all revenue from our book or other recommendations to adult literacy programs.)
