本なら売るほど 1
Finished — 2026-05-10
Started — 2026-04-22
This came recommended by Brain vs. Book, the Japanese book & manga blog in English that I always wanted. This blog made me want to read more, to read in Japanese more, to spend more time in bookstores, to talk to people about books, to write more about the things I read, to read primarily on paper again. To confidently consider myself a “book person”, to affirm that the written word is my preferred primary interface to the world. Having seen a writeup there and added it to my infinitely expanding OmniFocus project “Japanese Books to Consider”, I found this volume shining up at me from the featured, cover-out, horizontally-stacked lower shelf thingy at Daiwa Books in our neighborhood. (Surely this special shelf has a name?… Yes! 平台 hiradai!) Booksellers love this book about a bookseller; it seemed to be enshrined there on the hiradai with a bit of extra affection.
I too of course love books about books and book culture. I stress about how to find the right recommendations of what to read next. A gimmick of this series is that each chapter centers around characters’ experiences of a real book, with margin notes about its publication calmly suggesting that you, too, might go seek them out. So to meander through this charming manga is to skim through a tour of recommendations from the author’s own idiosyncratic tastes, each infused with a bit of story and meaning — I’m most keen to read Jan Potocki’s The Manuscript Found in Saragossa myself.