"Also, if nothing else, writing this book has really changed the way I experience bookstores. I have a whole different appreciation for the amount of work packed into even the slimmest volume on the shelves"
About this Quote
There is a quiet flex in Garrett's humility: he frames authorship not as a victory lap but as a recalibration of perception. The line starts in the key of understatement ("Also, if nothing else"), the verbal equivalent of shrugging before admitting something intimate. It's a businessperson's way of approaching reverence: not mystical, not romantic, just earned respect rooted in labor.
The intent is partly testimonial and partly bridge-building. Garrett is telling would-be writers, readers, and maybe fellow professionals that making a book collapses the distance between consumer and producer. Bookstores stop being retail environments and become galleries of invisible work: drafts, edits, negotiations, design decisions, fact-checking, copyedits, deadlines. By singling out "even the slimmest volume", he punctures the common bias that worth is proportional to thickness. The subtext: you can't reliably judge intellectual or creative effort by surface metrics, the same way you can't judge a product solely by its interface or packaging.
Context matters because Garrett comes from a world that prizes outputs, efficiencies, and deliverables. In that light, the quote reads like a small cultural correction to the metrics brain: not everything valuable is legible at a glance, and the process is part of the product. It also carries an implicit critique of how bookstores (and consumers) can turn art into inventory. His changed "experience" is really a changed ethics of attention: a refusal to skim past the human effort embedded in objects we treat as effortless.
The intent is partly testimonial and partly bridge-building. Garrett is telling would-be writers, readers, and maybe fellow professionals that making a book collapses the distance between consumer and producer. Bookstores stop being retail environments and become galleries of invisible work: drafts, edits, negotiations, design decisions, fact-checking, copyedits, deadlines. By singling out "even the slimmest volume", he punctures the common bias that worth is proportional to thickness. The subtext: you can't reliably judge intellectual or creative effort by surface metrics, the same way you can't judge a product solely by its interface or packaging.
Context matters because Garrett comes from a world that prizes outputs, efficiencies, and deliverables. In that light, the quote reads like a small cultural correction to the metrics brain: not everything valuable is legible at a glance, and the process is part of the product. It also carries an implicit critique of how bookstores (and consumers) can turn art into inventory. His changed "experience" is really a changed ethics of attention: a refusal to skim past the human effort embedded in objects we treat as effortless.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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