All booksellers are the unsung heroes of American literature, but Paul Yamazaki is a superhero.

Colson Whitehead
Author of The Underground Railroad, Harlem Shuffle, and Crook Manifesto
If you love a bookstore, it’s whether you know it or not because you love a book buyer…and in the book world no book buyer is more legendary than Paul Yamazaki of City Lights. He has made the job into an art, an ethic, an adventure, and not infrequently an insurrectionary act.

Rebecca Solnit
Author of Recollections of My Nonexistence and
A Field Guide to Getting Lost
The incredible story of one of the greatest booksellers to ever live. …Like Yamazaki, I come from a non-traditional background as a reader. City Lights was a refuge and lightning rod for me as a bookstore, and Paul is a crucial part of that storied place which will always hold a place in my heart—and now Paul and his book will as well.

Tommy Orange
Author of There There and Wandering Stars
A wry, stirring, profoundly uplifting ode to bookselling––complete with riffs on capitalism, San Francisco, jazz, even the meaning of life––from one of the underappreciated literary titans of our time.

Hua Hsu
Author of Stay True: A Memoir
Paul Yamazaki is one of the greatest and most influential readers in the world. [This volume] reminds us that reading is an act of imagination, defiance, optimism and love. Paul brings the whole of his being to the world of books. May we all learn to do the same.

Katie Kitamura
Author of Intimacies and A Separation
There's a famous sign in the basement of City Lights that says: 'I am the door.' Paul Yamazaki has been the door for generations of readers and writers. He's a portal, not just into a world of books, but into a way of thinking about culture, of human communication and community. We're lucky to have him.

Hari Kunzru
Author of Red Pill and White Tears
This transcript of a two-day conversation with Paul Yamazaki is the *Tao of Bookselling*. One comes to the book expecting shoptalk, and finds instead a vision of the bookstore as a spiritual, intellectual, and political microcosm of the universe. How many of us are as wise as Paul about what we do, and can see the world in it?

Eliot Weinberger
Author of An Elemental Thing and The Life of Tu Fu
Paul Yamazaki, one of the most generous and genuinely curious people I have ever had the good fortune of spending time with, has given us a gift with *Reading the Room*. In this characteristically unpretentious and generous volume, a great bookseller has opened wide the doors to what it means to sell, write, and read books in the 21st century. It’s a gift.

Stephen Sparks
Point Reyes Books
Paul Yamazaki is a poet and a philosopher of bookselling, on top of being a fabulous storyteller. If you want to know why buying and selling books is far more than transactional or why City Lights is possibly the greatest American bookstore, you can find your answer in *Reading the Room*.

Aleksandar Hemon
Author of The World and All That It Holds and
The Lazarus Project