How could I resist the subject matter in The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore by Evan Friss? Bookstores are my favourite places to shop, although I am drawn to secondhand and antiquarian shops over retail outlets. Friss covered both, as well as bookshops on wheels, sidewalk stalls and the mass murderer of all kinds of bricks-and-mortar stores: Amazon. After 312 pages of text, Friss supplied an incredible 67 pages of endnotes. Almost all of these notes provided bibliographic references only and could be ignored. Therefore the heft of the book is thinner than what appears between the covers.
We read about the first American bookstores, and those that were pioneers in their fields (though not necessarily the first) such as stores dealing exclusively with queer content, or black-focussed or feminist bookstores. Friss profiled some of the most beloved and famous bookstore owners, not all (but must) of them a bit quirky, and how each one seemed to live and breathe a life of all things books.
Bookstores have managed to survive amidst changing technologies, and I don’t believe the paper medium for reading is doomed:
“Nineteenth-century booksellers worried that public libraries would destroy them. In the twentieth century, the bogeyman was the radio, then the movies, then TV, then mass-market paperbacks, and then the superstores. In the twenty-first century, ebooks and Amazon have been the existential threats. The fear that the book business is imperiled–near death, even–has always been an industry staple.”
Yet the number of my favourite bookstores continues to shrink. On my latest visit to Helsinki, I wrote about the disappearance of one (Antikvariaatti Korkeavuori) and the downsizing of another (Akateeminen Kirjakauppa). Everything boils down to the bottom line, and as one New York vendor explained:
“Booksellers needed profits, of course, but they didn’t need much profit to keep the doors open. ‘If I wanted to make money, I’d sell herring,’ one Fourth Avenue seller claimed. It was a business and a passion.”
In the 1940’s and 50’s I would have loved browsing amidst the booksellers along New York’s Fourth Avenue, known as Book Row. One of the stores, the Strand Bookstore, is the sole survivor today, yet now located at 828 Broadway.
I liked the profile of bibliophile Burt Britton, a bookseller at the Strand:
“He also invited herds of librarians to browse in person. When they did, he didn’t hesitate to correct their pronunciation of Nabokov’s name–or their taste. ‘It’s just as easy to read something good,’ he would say, replacing the book in their hands with another. He was grumpy and charming. When one customer asked him for a book recently published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, adding, ‘I don’t know the name of it, and it’s got a subtitle, but I don’t know that either,’ Britton let him have it: ‘Jesus Christ! … Get outta here!’ But as the customer walked away, Britton told him exactly where to find it. (FSG had published just one book with a subtitle in the previous week.)”
The Bookshop was a delight to read which I could not put down. How I wished I could travel back in time to visit some of these stores, and I often reminisced about the favourite stores of my past, sorrowfully no longer in business or transformed into establishments I no longer recognize.
Friss employed the nominal lexicalization of the virgule, i.e. slash, throughout the book. It grew annoying after the second example. These examples occurred near the end of the book, when I realized I needed a couple citations:
“Borders began in Ann Arbor, Michigan, as a small used bookshop in 1971. It had grown tremendously by the time Kmart acquired it in 1992, at which point Kmart already owned Waldenbooks, which already owned Brentano’s. Borders-slash-Waldenbooks-slash-Brentano’s-slash-Kmart was a powerhouse.” (p. 237)
and:
“And then there was author-slash-actor-slash-playwright-slash-hiphopper Lin-Manuel Miranda.” (p.298)
In a chapter on the Aryan Book Store, which operated in Los Angeles in 1933, Friss alternated between Adolph Hitler (p. 159) and Adolf (p. 170).
Find this book in the Mississauga Library System's on-line catalogue
