Gyalten Lekden's Reviews > The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore

Both inviting and informative, like any proper bookshop should be! This popular history is very readable, being meticulous in its exploration without ever feeling bogged down by stats or timelines. I think the structure was really smart, sticking to a roughly chronological format while highlighting specific bookshops as exemplars of a particular historical trend or inflection point or key component of the identity of the American bookshop. Choosing to have little palate cleansers between chapters discussing other random bookshops and booksellers was also nice, it added a warmth and familiarity to the text that was welcome.

It feels pretty exhaustive, starting with Benjamin Franklin and ending with brave souls starting in a post-Amazon landscape, yet never exhausting. They are some areas that I would have actually enjoyed a little deeper dive into, especially as the final verdict seems to be that contemporary bookshops exist as social spaces as much if not more than as retail spaces, and that is a wildly interesting phenomenon. He does a good job of chronicling this, from a chapter on politically-aligned bookshops, one on queer activist bookshops, and one on Black activist bookshops, all set up for comparison to Barnes & Noble and its façade of community and comfort as well as to Amazon Books which lacks the pretense of being anything other than pure capitalism. Yet I left the book feeling more intrigued and interested than satisfied, in a way, because it seems like there are a half dozen books waiting to be written just on this very topic. I can’t hold that against this book, though. This is a broad history that does its job very well, condensing a long arc of American history into something that is fun and accessible, with research and writing that is competent and inviting.