Punching the Air in the Bookshop

Punching the Air by Ibi Zoboi and Yusef Salaam

"The bookshelves here

are not walls

They're closed windows

and all I have to do

is pull out one book

to make these windows

wide open"

 - Ibi Zoboi, Punching the Air

 

Lights Out For The Territory in the Bookshop

Lights Out For The Territory by Iain Sinclair

"I mean that certain fictions, chiefly Conan Doyle, Stevenson, but many others also, laid out a template that was more powerful than any local documentary account - the presences that they created, or "figures" if you prefer it, like Rabbi Loew's Golem, became too much and too fast to be contained within the conventional limits of that fiction. They got out into the stream of time, the ether; they escaped into the labyrinth. They achieved an independent existence." - Iain Sinclair