Book: The Bookshop

 Book: The Bookshop

Author: Evan Friss

Pages: 416

This is my 43rd read for the year

What Amazon Says:

Bookstores have always been unlike any other kind of store, shaping readers and writers, and influencing our tastes, thoughts, and politics.  They nurture local communities whilecreating new ones of their own.  Bookshops are powerful spaces, but they are also endangered ones.  We see the stakes: wat has been, and what might be lost.  Evan friss's history of the bookshop draws on oral histories, archival collections, municipal records, diaries, letters, and interviews, with leading booksellers to offer a fascinating look at this institution beloved by so many.  The story begins with Benjamin Franklin's first bookstore in Philadelphia and takes us to a range of booksellers including the Strand, Chicago's Marshall Field and Co, the Gotham Book Mart, specialty stores like Oscar Wilde and Drum and Spear, sidewalk sellers of used books, Barnes and Noble, Amazon Books, and Parnassus.  The Bookshop is also a history of the leading figures in American bookselling, often impassioned eccentics, and a history of how books have been merketed and sold over the couse of more than 2 centuries - including, for example, a 3,000-pound elephant who signed books at Marshall Field's in 1944.  This book is a love letter to bookstores, a Charming chronicle for anyone who cherishes these sanctuaries of literature, and essential reading to understand how these vital institutions have shaped American Life - and why we still need them.

This was a fantastic read.  The history of all these different bookstores was fascinating.  The writing is superb - as well as the research done on the history and the people behind the bookstores.  From small shops around the time of Ben Franklin to Amazon today - he covers a wide history of what bookstores were and what they have become.  A lot of great anecdotes and personal touches, I am glad I found this one.

Stars: 5