“The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore,” by Evan Friss (Viking, 2024, 403 pages, $39.99)
Did you resolve to read more in 2025? Congratulations on such a thoughtful resolution and here’s a book that might help with it. Evan Friss’ “The Bookshop” is an homage to reading and those who make books available to us.
As Friss writes in the introduction, “Readers, writers, and literature are shaped by how and where we buy our books.”
Friss writes about booksellers of the past such as Benjamin Franklin; James Fields, who operated The Old Corner Bookstore in Boston, which Friss calls “the birth of the American bookstore”; and Marcella Burns Hafner, manager of the bookstore located in the Marshall Field’s Department Store in Chicago — “the first book superstore.”
He covers bookshops that catered to the gay community, black readers and American Nazis.
I enjoyed reading about bookstores I have visited, such as The Strand in New York City, Powell’s in Portland, Shakespeare and Company in Paris, and the Barnes & Noble on Fifth Avenue in New York. As I read about the ups and downs of Barnes & Noble, I recalled my part-time job helping to open the first Barnes & Noble in Topeka in 1995.
It was also fun to read about authors who became booksellers, such as Ann Patchett. Her store in Nashville, Parnassus, is a mecca for fledgling booksellers, including a friend of mine who subsequently opened her own independent bookstore in a small community here in Kansas.
As Friss notes, there were already some 350 books about bookstores of them before his book appeared. He calls them places “full of discovery, of chance, of wonder” — not unlike his book.
Contact Ted Ayres at tdamsa76@yahoo.com.
