James Klagge's Reviews > The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore

A pleasure to read. Not exhaustive, but selective--featuring shops that represent various stages and styles in the long story of bookselling. Of course none of "my" favorites were featured, though Politics and Prose was mentioned occasionally. Nevertheless I'll add my 2 cents:
Growing up we had no bookstore in town, so the local library was the main source of books.
Apart from books I bought for college classes, I really didn't start gathering/collecting books until a retiring professor put a bunch of his books outside his office, and I thought I had found a goldmine. (Though don't think I have any of those books anymore.)
In grad school at UCLA I think I mostly relied on the university bookstore, though I bought some books at Westwood Books (I think it was called--no longer around). But I spent some summers in Chicago and I fell in love with my first independent bookstore--Great Expectations, in Evanston https://chicagoreader.com/news-politi... . A marvelous place with an impressive collection of Philosophy books. Allegedly it was once mentioned by Umberto Eco as one of the great bookstores! (It went out of business in 2001.)
Moving to Blacksburg, we had Books, Strings & Things--that sold books and records https://that70sblacksburg.blogspot.co... . That was also a wonderful place, and especially as a source of bootleg CD's in the '90's! It went out of business in the late '90's and was bought out by Booksmith, which hung on for a few years before it too went out of business around 2000. In the era before the internet and pre-Amazon I would study the latest Books in Print to find obscure books that interested me. Then I could order them through BS&T.
I remember discovering Amazon in 1999. I'm sure I used it, but more for used books than new. I really fell in love with Borders. Especially one near where my parents lived between Akron and Cleveland. They had a whole aisle of Philosophy books, though it gradually shrank over the years! (They went out of business in 2011.)
My wife's family lives in Greensboro, so I was delighted when Scuppernong Books opened there around 2014 https://www.scuppernongbooks.com/ . I have enjoyed supporting them, and they have done a lot to become a community site. So it created a real dilemma for me when an independent bookstore finally came back to Blacksburg in the form of Blacksburg Books https://www.blacksburgbooks.com/ . Neither store has a very large inventory, so I mostly support them by special orders, but now I sort of split my orders between them!
While I still occasionally order used books through Amazon, I have tried to find them first at Zubal Books, in Cleveland https://www.zubalbooks.com/ . They used to be a great physical used bookstore, but a number of years ago they went totally on-line. Oh well.
So that's my story. I'm sure all book lovers have stories about their favorite shops. But this book did a nice job of bringing that all back to mind.