Fred Jenkins's Reviews > The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore

This is a very well researched book, with lots of references to archives and other primary sources. Not surprising for a book by a professional historian. More surprising is that it is readable and entertaining. Friss follows a roughly chronological arrangement and covers a small number of bookshops in depth, with some others noted in passing. He begins with Franklin in Philadelphia and next moves on to the Old Corner Bookstore/Ticknor and Fields in Boston, a major force in early nineteenth-century American literature. Then he moves to bookshops on wheels, department store bookshops (Marshall Field's), Bookshop Row (NYC), Gotham Book Mart (NYC), The Strand (NYC), a variety of theme-oriented bookshops (feminist, LGBTQ, radical, Black), street booksellers, Barnes & Noble, Amazon. He ends with Ann Patchett's indie bookshop, Parnassus, in Nashville.

This is very much an east coast book; it reminds one of the New Yorker map of the US. Most of the bookshops are in the northeast, mostly in NYC. I will grant the cultural and commercial significance of most of his picks, but he omits or scants a lot. City Lights in San Francisco, at least as significant as Gotham and the Strand, gets only a couple of mentions. Powell's (Portland) likewise. Border's also gets relatively little attention; the Borders in Ann Arbor, originally an indie, was a great bookshop and the chain was higher quality than most of the competition. Barnes & Noble may have been first, but it was never as good as Borders. Antiquarian and second-hand bookshops get relatively little attention. Friss also generally ignores specialty bookshops: mystery, scifi (e.g., Uncle Edgar's and Uncle Hugo's in Minneapolis), non-English language books (e.g., Schoenhof's in Cambridge) etc. But they are an important part of the bookshop scene.

This is a pretty good book and I learned a number of things that I hadn't known. But as a history of American bookshops, it is quite selective and spotty. Much is a paean to the indies (Friss is married to an indie bookseller). I like indies and buy a lot of books from them (most recently Moon Palace in Minneapolis). But I also buy from chains and Amazon. People forget that in the days before Borders, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon, most places were book deserts. And even if you had a good indie nearby, there was a lot that you could only get by special order and mail order. I only started buying from Amazon, when our really fine local indie was taken over by Books-a-Million (aka, the barbarians from Birmingham) and they told me to take my special orders to Amazon. Which I did, along with much of the rest of my business. When I was a college student, I had to open an account with Blackwells in Oxford to get Latin and Greek books by mail; nobody much in America stocks them (then and now).

Four stars and not three because I am uncomfortable dinging an author for not writing the book that I would have wanted him to write.