Publishers Weekly
★ 06/24/2024
In 1993, there were 13,499 bookstores in America; in 2021, there were 5,591. Yet historian Friss (On Bicycles) offers an upbeat and immersive take on bookselling’s much ballyhooed demise; “bookstores have never felt more alive,” he asserts (he also cites a famous quip made by a bookseller in 1961 that books have “been a dying business for 5,000 years”). Friss’s jampacked account spans from early America to the present day, beginning with precursors to the modern bookstore like Benjamin Franklin’s Philadelphia printshop (where the first novel was printed in America—Samuel Richardson’s Pamela) and Boston literary hangout The Old Corner (where Nathaniel Hawthorne liked to loiter), and ending with chapters on Amazon Books and Ann Patchett’s Parnassus in Nashville, Tenn. (Friss gleefully notes that, while Amazon closed all of its 24 brick-and-mortar stores by 2022, Parnassus has experienced double-digit growth since it 2011 founding). Along the way, he chronicles the history of over a dozen notable bookstores (many of them now-defunct New York greats, like the Midtown modernist stronghold Gotham Book Mart and the Greenwich Village paragon of gay rights activism Oscar Wilde), interspersing these chapters with ruminations on the role of the buyer, the importance of the UPS driver, and other bits of bookstore arcana that refreshingly focus on the behind-the-scenes experience of bookselling. It’s an entrancing deep dive into the book industry, reports of whose death have been greatly exaggerated. (Aug.)
From the Publisher
Advance Praise for The Bookshop
"If you love books, and bookstores, you're absolutely going to love Evan Friss's The Bookshop. . . . 'That bookstores continue to endure is, in some ways, something of a miracle,' Friss writes in his introduction. But we're so thankful they do—and that there's this tribute to them."
—Town & Country’s “39 Must-Read Books of Summer 2024”
"Upbeat and immersive. . . . An entrancing deep dive into the book industry."
—Publishers Weekly (STARRED review)
"Eye-opening. . . . A thoroughly engaging, delightful excursion into the wondrous world of books.”
—Kirkus Reviews (STARRED review)
“Bookstores are such idiosyncratic expressions of the humans who run them, and it is a delight to wander through the bookstores of American history in this warm, generous book. I find myself in excellent company amongst the featured booksellers—all fully dedicated, driven by passion, and slightly mad. It's a wonderful business we're in.”
—Emma Straub, New York Times bestselling author and owner of Books Are Magic
“This bookseller read Evan Friss’s The Bookshop with the greatest delight. Friss’s history of the independent bookshop in the United states is very much like his subject—deeply authoritative, very personal, and very engaging.”
—Paul Yamazaki, City Lights Bookseller and Publisher
“Is there anything better than a bookshop? Perhaps, just perhaps, a book about bookshops. This is what Evan Friss has given us, and like its subject, it is a portal to endless discovery. The histories and personalities, the challenges and pleasures, everything happening behind the scenes—all come alive in his marvelous account.”
—Glenn Adamson, author of Craft: An American History
“Evan Friss has written a charming, deeply researched history of the understated but vital role that booksellers have played in forging the American identity. Rich in incident and richer in the colorful characters who have sold—or tried to sell—books to a reliably intractable public from the days of the Old Corner Bookstore till today, The Bookshop is an absolute delight.”
—Stephen Sparks, owner of Point Reyes Books
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2024-04-19
A past and present who’s who of America’s diverse bookstores.
Historian Friss, the author of The Cycling City and On Bicycles, begins with a description of his visit to Three Lives Bookstore in New York City, the first of many encounters with booksellers across America. In Philadelphia, master entrepreneur Benjamin Franklin was “a shopkeeper who sold books” and many other products, and in 1828, the Old Corner Bookstore was born in Boston. Over the next few decades, the number of stores in the U.S. gradually increased. On the eve of the Civil War, the North dwarfed the South in bookstores, and stores that printed books and itinerant bookstores were common. To counter the male-dominated American Booksellers Association, the Women’s National Book Association was created in 1917. Around the same time, Chicago’s Marshall Field & Company was its own superstore and its successful manager, Marcella Hahner, became a sought-after book blurber who initiated in-store book signings, book rentals, mailed Christmas catalogs, and the first book festival. Francis Steloff, the “powerhouse” of Gotham Book Mart, printed catalogs written by authors (Pound, Cummings) and sold many illegal imported books. Friss browses wistfully among New York City’s Book Row, especially the massive Strand bookstore, and his chapter on the pro-Hitler Aryan Boom Store in Los Angeles is particularly eye-opening. The Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookstore in Greenwich Village, he writes, was the “first of its kind.” Friss also covers the FBI-investigated, Black-focused Drum & Spear in Washington, D.C. Then the elephant in the room, Len Riggio’s Barnes & Noble, raises its head. Friss does a fine, fair job of assessing it and the other superstores and their origins, including Amazon, the “eight-hundred-pound gorilla,” the failure of their bookstores, and the success of Ann Patchett’s, Parnassus.
A thoroughly engaging, delightful excursion into the wondrous world of books.
