Are you an avid book shopper? Meet Murray Browne. He is too.

"When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a countryish teenaged boy finding them, and having them speak to him. The reviews, the stacks in Brentano's [Bookstores], are just hurdles to get over, to place the books on that shelf." --John Updike (at age 36), from an interview in the Paris Review

Murray Browne was that "countryish teenaged boy" looking for the books that spoke to him in the library of his hometown of Milford, Illinois, the "Buckle on the Corn Belt," as he describes it in his book, The Book Shopper: A Life in Review.

He submitted his manuscript to us at Paul Dry Books because he'd come upon, read, and liked So Many Books by Gabriel Zaid (which we published in 2003) and thought we might like his writing about books. He read us correctly, since, on first reading, I took to his manuscript and then accepted it for publication.

In The Book Shopper, Murray Browne writes about the books and writers he's read and reread, about the used bookshops where he's bought these books, sometimes over and over, and about his book-related habits and idiosyncrasies:

"This predilection [for browsing used bookstores] has grown into a real (albeit quirky) passion for thinking about the many ways books affect our lives--how and where we shop for them, the people we know who read them, the small passages that stick in our heads for years only to reappear at the oddest moments. The minds of book people are mosaics of ideas, thoughts, and phrases that have originated in books . . . I'm fascinated by how we hold and shape these fragments, how they coalesce into what I call my book shopper state of mind. -- from Chapter 1 of The Book Shopper

We may wonder if the digital book will do away with bookstores, books, and the bookshelves that hold them. We can be sure, though, that reading--the act of taking into one's inner life someone else's written words--is here to stay. In The Book Shopper, Murray Browne portrays the delight of this act of edification.