Bookworm–fiction

The bookstore by Evan Friss (ISBN 9780593299920, Viking, $30 hardcover, 416 pages).

The New York Times calls it “a spirited defense of this important, strange and adversity-defying American retail category.”

As a bookstore owner, I’m not sure if this is a way of defying the odds or more a way of building connections in a world that has often become cold and impersonal. But either way, this is a fascinating book for people looking for interesting knowledge.

Friss examines the American book trade and its central place in our cultural life, from department stores to independent bookstores, from sophisticated first edition dealers to street vendors, and from chains to specialty community outlets.

Bookstores have always been different from any other business. They shaped readers and writers and influenced our sensibilities. Everyone who visits the store (and I do) can tell of their own experiences growing up with books. They nurture local communities while creating new ones.

Bookshops are powerful places, but they are also at risk. In The Bookshop we see what is at stake: what was and what could be lost.

Drawing on oral histories, archival collections, parish records, diaries, letters, and interviews with leading booksellers, Evan Friss’s history of the bookstore offers a fascinating insight into this institution.

The story begins with Benjamin Franklin’s first bookstore in Philadelphia. It takes us to various booksellers, including The Strand, Marshall Field & Company in Chicago, Gotham Book Mart, specialty stores such as Oscar Wilde and Drum and Spear, street vendors of used books, Barnes & Noble, Amazon Books, and Parnassus.

The Bookshop is also a history of the leading figures of the American book trade, often passionate eccentrics, and a history of the marketing and sale of books over more than two centuries. This includes, for example, a 3,000-pound elephant that signed books at Marshall Field’s in 1944.