Aisles, shelves and stalls

Evan Friss’s The Bookshop is an admirable exploration of US bookselling. It comprises thirteen chapters on various booksellers across US history, which are broken up by short interstitial pieces on bookshop-related phenomena such as the UPS driver, bibliosmia (the habit of smelling books), bookshop animals and books about bookshops. He does not offer compend­ious data on all the corners of the trade, preferring to focus attention on one or two key figures per chapter.

An early chapter on Ben­jamin Franklin provides a good overview of its subject’s career in the industry while fleshing out the print and sales dynamics of colonial America. An unsettling chapter on the “Aryan Book Store” sheds light on extremist politics in interwar America while also reminding the reader that, as cultural institutions, bookshops have been established to cater to a wide variety of niche interests, even distasteful ones. And a charming chapter on the nineteenth-century Old Corner bookshop in Boston shows how booksellers could be important for authors (Nathaniel Hawthorne was particularly close to the owners and Louisa May Alcott was a regular), ending with a thudding reminder of the ravages of time, because the long-running establishment is now a Chipotle.

Even as certain areas are left underexplored or passed over – the Old Corner’s Boston contemporary Elizabeth Peabody’s bookshop, a transcendentalist outpost, is not mentioned, and it would be nice to have more on bookseller initiatives such as the Women’s National Book Association – the book offers the reader an engaging stroll through the aisles, shelves and street stalls of American bookselling.

Friss depicts bookshops as cultural institutions in their own right, beyond their basic commercial role as distributor, while considering Amazon’s impact on independent bookselling. Although some see it as simply a threat to the future of the high-street bookstore, the Booksellers Association has reported that, despite shops closing, there has been a modest increase in bookshop openings over the past two years. Bookshop spaces still draw people. And not just for the quick sale. A glance at WorldCat for titles including the words “bookshop” or “bookstore” show dozens of works published in 2024 alone – mostly fiction, many by major publishers. This particular print institution con­tinues to stoke the imagination, and the more reflection on its multi­tudinous roles in our everyday lives, the better.

The Bookshop will appeal to those who are book and bookshop lovers at heart, even if they know little about the particulars of the US industry. Add it to the shelf next to Robin Ince’s recent bookshop tour (TLS, October 28, 2022), James Patterson’s new collection of bookseller profiles and Michael Robb’s forthcoming work offering a history of British bookselling.

The post Aisles, shelves and stalls appeared first on TLS.