The Bookstop: A History of the American Bookstore
Frederick Buechner’s The Eyes of the Heart opens with a description of his study, what he calls his “Magic Kingdom,” full of treasures any reader would envy. “There are such wonderful books in it that I expect people to tremble with excitement, as I would, on entering it for the first time,” he writes, “but few of them do so because they don’t know or care enough about books to have any idea what they are seeing.”
No doubt more than a few R.J. readers understand that tremble of excitement on seeing or holding a rare or favorite book, in which case Evan Friss’s The Bookshop will be a joy for them to read. Anyone who enjoys American history, in fact, will appreciate the way Friss portrays the evolution of the bookstore and how it helped shape and was shaped by that history.
A professor of history at James Madison University, Friss writes in a crisp, lively, engaging style. Each chapter portrays real bookstore owners–most of them quirky, colorful, sometimes curmudgeonly. Booksellers, he shows, are unique: bibliophiles who are part entrepreneur, part librarian, part community activist. And while Friss’s book is carefully researched–he has seventy pages of notes in the back, followed by an extensive index–he uses “blind endnotes,” which, while accurate and helpful, means no visible annotations in the text. Consequently, The Bookshop reads like a good story, full of interesting characters, plot complications, and unusual facts that are fascinating. Did you know, for instance, that “bibliosmia” refers to the scent of a book? Or that the first Amazon Bookstore was, in fact, a feminist bookstore, likely the first of its kind, and which later sued Amazon.com for trademark infringement?
Friss’s introduction quotes a bookseller who quips that books “have been a dying business for at least five thousand years” (8). That captures Friss’s main point: the death of bookstores has been prophesied from the beginning, but his book’s emphasis and structure push against that. While each of the thirteen chapters focuses on a specific figure or movement in bookselling history, he follows each with an interesting vignette of a particular aspect of the trade touched on in the chapter: “The UPS driver,” “The Smell,” “The Cat,” “The Guy Who Never Buys Anything,” to name a few. What’s clear is that Friss has learned everything he can about bookstores and is eager to share it with his readers.
His story begins with America’s first real bookseller, Ben Franklin, who “understood that we are what we read. And that what we read is dictated by what authors choose to write, what publishers choose to publish, what printers choose to print, and what, where, and how booksellers choose to sell” (16). Franklin happily filled all four roles and had a huge influence on the rise of citizen readership in the colonies of the eighteenth century. He printed the first novel in America, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, and it was Franklin who urged Thomas Paine to write and publish Common Sense. Friss clearly enjoys Franklin and agrees with him when he “later credited the uptick in reading as one of the sources of the Revolution. Historians would have a hard time disagreeing” (30).
There’s a chapter on The Old Corner Bookshop, which opened in Boston in 1828 and took off when a young man named James T. Fields came to work there and, again later, when another named William D. Ticknor bought the store. Together they would publish classics like Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter as well as The Atlantic Monthly in 1859. Many famous authors browsed the shelves of The Old Corner Bookshop, including Hawthorne, who visited so much that they gave him a chair in Ticknor’s office where “the author spent countless hours sitting quietly as Ticknor worked a few feet away” (42). There’s a wonderful chapter called “Parnassus on Wheels,” which prompted me to buy and read Christopher Morley’s classic book by that name–a short, humorous novel about a bookseller on wheels and the adventures he has while hawking books in small towns and at country farm houses. Subsequent chapters of Friss’s history focus on the burgeoning bookstore business over the next century: Marshall Fields in Chicago, The Strand in New York, and the eventual rise of Barnes and Noble. He also takes time to focus on the appearance of more specialized bookstores focusing on gay and lesbian literature, Black literature, Latino literature–and, even, the Aryan bookstores which appeared around World War II.
Each chapter explores the various chronological iterations of bookstores–from corner bookshops, sidewalk shops, and traveling bookshops to superstores. But Chapter 12 looms large in Friss’s history: “Amazon Books.” His take on Amazon is fair, but the facts make clear that Jeff Bezos’s endeavor was death to a lot of independent bookstores. Friss notes that it was Bezos who said “there were no ‘800-pound gorillas in bookselling.’ He wanted to be the gorilla” (274). As Amazon’s algorithm-based business soared, independent bookstores closed in droves, which seems to have pleased Bezos, whom Friss quotes as saying to his team, “Proceed as if your goal…is to put everyone selling physical books out of business” (277).
Which still hasn’t happened. Gratefully, Friss’s last chapter, “Parnassus,” is about Ann Patchett’s bookstore in Nashville and how her passion for books and her writer’s celebrity has helped revive the independent bookstore movement across America. Named after Christopher Morley’s novel, Patchett’s store has thrived, as have other independents. The indies took a hit because of Amazon, but Friss says of the survivors, “Everyone hated Amazon, whose monstrous dominance induced an even greater demand for in-person bookselling and for small, vibrant businesses in general” (295). It’s an encouraging last chapter.
As old institutions across America struggle for relevance today, this important book reminds us that there are simple things we can do to help preserve at least one of them: avoid buying books from a faceless algorithm and, instead, visit local bookstores where real people, most of them readers themselves, curate real shelves stacked with real books in a real bookshop.
In doing so, we might more likely pass on to the next generation of readers what Roger Mifflin, the beloved, red-bearded bookseller in Parnassus on Wheels, believed: “When you sell a man a book, you don’t sell him just twelve ounces of paper, ink, and glue–you sell him a whole new life.”
Thanks, Mark, for your engaging review calling this book to our attention. I was surprised, however, to see Amazon listed next to the photograph of the book, rather than “Available through a local book store.”
With all good wishes,
Jack
So why is this book listed for sale on Amazon???
My librarian daughter-in-law began her career driving the local library bookmobile. Kids in the community looked for it with delight, almost rivaling the jingle-playing ice cream trucks.
I like bookstores, almost as much as libraries. Franklin the bookseller was also in on the creation the Free Library of Philadelphia. I’d love to see a similar history of the public library.
Thanks, Mark, for enlarging the classroom you left to now include all of us and inspire us to find “a whole new life” in the pages of literary treasures.
Thanks, Mark. Bibliosmia—some of us at Eerdmans took special pride in the fact that historian and public intellectual Martin Marty once pronounced his first Eerdmans book as his best-smelling book. Maybe something, we conjectured, about West Michigan Dutch-Calvinist horses and the glue they produced.