First Friday Rec: The Bookshop

Title: The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore
Author: Evan Friss
Genre: Nonfiction
Pages: 416
Publication Date: Aug 6, 2024
StoryGraph* Moods: Informative, Reflective, Inspiring
How I Stumbled Upon This Book: Saw it in a bookshop. 🙂
Other Books by this author: On Bicycles: A 200 Year History of Cycling in New York City and The Cycling City
*StoryGraph also offers content warnings.

Description: A history of bookshops drawing on “oral histories, archival collections, municipal records, diaries, letters, and interviews with leading booksellers” is probably the unsexiest way to describe this book – but that is what it is at its most basic. On the page, it’s a fascinating look at the=is U.S. institution that reaches all the way back to Franklin’s first shop in Philadelphia up to today’s battle against big box stores and that mammoth online platform that sells, well, everything.

At its heart, this is a love letter to bookshops – it’s charming in its understanding of what a sanctuary bookshops can be, as well as their importance in our history and in our present. If you love bookshops, you will love this book about bookshops.

Why I recommend this book: It’s probably not a shock, given the description, why I would have been drawn to read this – and why I would love it. And of course I’m going to recommend it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ But the fact that it’s about bookshops is not the only reason I’m recommending it – it’s simply the reason I picked it up when I saw it on a table in at my local bookshop.

It is, quite honestly, interesting to see how the bookshops we know today came to be – not only the indie ones we love, but also those big box shops and the online platforms. Because, well, we can’t talk about one without the other. Their histories are intertwined.

Bez0s “was, however, an excellent student and signed up for Bookselling school. Or the closest thing to it – a four-day workshop held in conjunction with the ABA conference in Portland. The instructor was Richard Howorth, then president of the ABA, and owner of the legendary Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi. Bez0s was one of fifty pupils taking notes on the basics: inventory, marketing, accounting, and customer relations.”

“Years later, Howorth regretted having taught that one student who kept quiet about his intentions. ‘If I saw him today,’ he said, ‘I’d probably whop him upside the head.'”
~ Evan Friss, The Bookshop