The Bookshop

March 1, 2024

Friss writes a deeply researched book about U.S. bookstores, ranging from the 18th century to modern times and from indies to department-store chains. Each chapter focuses on a different bookshop and explores not just its own individual creation but the culture it supported. Prepub Alert.

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Starred review from May 15, 2024
A past and present who's who of America's diverse bookstores. Historian Friss, the author of The Cycling City and On Bicycles, begins with a description of his visit to Three Lives Bookstore in New York City, the first of many encounters with booksellers across America. In Philadelphia, master entrepreneur Benjamin Franklin was "a shopkeeper who sold books" and many other products, and in 1828, the Old Corner Bookstore was born in Boston. Over the next few decades, the number of stores in the U.S. gradually increased. On the eve of the Civil War, the North dwarfed the South in bookstores, and stores that printed books and itinerant bookstores were common. To counter the male-dominated American Booksellers Association, the Women's National Book Association was created in 1917. Around the same time, Chicago's Marshall Field & Company was its own superstore and its successful manager, Marcella Hahner, became a sought-after book blurber who initiated in-store book signings, book rentals, mailed Christmas catalogs, and the first book festival. Francis Steloff, the "powerhouse" of Gotham Book Mart, printed catalogs written by authors (Pound, Cummings) and sold many illegal imported books. Friss browses wistfully among New York City's Book Row, especially the massive Strand bookstore, and his chapter on the pro-Hitler Aryan Boom Store in Los Angeles is particularly eye-opening. The Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookstore in Greenwich Village, he writes, was the "first of its kind." Friss also covers the FBI-investigated, Black-focused Drum & Spear in Washington, D.C. Then the elephant in the room, Len Riggio's Barnes & Noble, raises its head. Friss does a fine, fair job of assessing it and the other superstores and their origins, including Amazon, the "eight-hundred-pound gorilla," the failure of their bookstores, and the success of Ann Patchett's, Parnassus. A thoroughly engaging, delightful excursion into the wondrous world of books.

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Starred review from June 24, 2024
In 1993, there were 13,499 bookstores in America; in 2021, there were 5,591. Yet historian Friss (On Bicycles) offers an upbeat and immersive take on bookselling’s much ballyhooed demise; “bookstores have never felt more alive,” he asserts (he also cites a famous quip made by a bookseller in 1961 that books have “been a dying business for 5,000 years”). Friss’s jampacked account spans from early America to the present day, beginning with precursors to the modern bookstore like Benjamin Franklin’s Philadelphia printshop (where the first novel was printed in America—Samuel Richardson’s Pamela) and Boston literary hangout The Old Corner (where Nathaniel Hawthorne liked to loiter), and ending with chapters on Amazon Books and Ann Patchett’s Parnassus in Nashville, Tenn. (Friss gleefully notes that, while Amazon closed all of its 24 brick-and-mortar stores by 2022, Parnassus has experienced double-digit growth since it 2011 founding). Along the way, he chronicles the history of over a dozen notable bookstores (many of them now-defunct New York greats, like the Midtown modernist stronghold Gotham Book Mart and the Greenwich Village paragon of gay rights activism Oscar Wilde), interspersing these chapters with ruminations on the role of the buyer, the importance of the UPS driver, and other bits of bookstore arcana that refreshingly focus on the behind-the-scenes experience of bookselling. It’s an entrancing deep dive into the book industry, reports of whose death have been greatly exaggerated.

July 1, 2024
Friss' lively history traces the evolution of American bookstores from the earliest days, when printers, including Benjamin Franklin, a printer turned publisher, author, and bookseller, began selling books. Franklin was the f irst American to print a novel, Samuel Richardson's Pamela. While Franklin's own Poor Richard's Almanac was extremely profitable, T homas Paine's Common Sense is considered the first best-seller. Friss engagingly guides us chronologically from the Old Corner Bookstore (home to Hawthorne, now a Chipotle), through the early department stores, like Marshall Field & Company Book Department, run by "the Czarina," Marcella Burns Hahner, who organized the first book fair. Independents soon began to dominate, including Gotham Book Mart, the Strand, Powell's, and RJ Julia. T he 1980s and 1990s saw the emergence and eventual dominance of chain stores and superstores. The current goliath is Amazon, but Friss gives us hope by noting the increase in specialty independent bookstores staffed by passionate bibliophiles who hope to provide customers with "something . . . that might be decisive, that might inspire them to great and noble thoughts.

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