The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore - Evan Friss

Written by Evan Friss
Read by Jay Myers
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Publisher: Books on Tape
Release date: August 6, 2024
Duration: 10:15:54

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 while creating new ones of their own. Bookshops are powerful spaces, but they are also endangered ones. In The Bookshop, we see the stakes: what 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 & Company, the Gotham Book Mart, specialty stores like Oscar Wilde and Drum and Spear, sidewalk sellers of used books, Barnes & Noble, Amazon Books, and Parnassus. The Bookshop is also a history of the leading figures in American bookselling, often impassioned eccentrics, and a history of how books have been marketed and sold over the course of more than two centuries—including, for example, a 3,000-pound elephant who signed books at Marshall Field’s in 1944.

The Bookshop 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.

“Jay Myers narrates this fascinating audiobook about American bookstores with enthusiasm for its subject, neutrality toward its facts, and admiration for its stories. … Myers’s pacing is leisurely, and he highlights meaningful quotes, such as the one from a bookseller who points out the industry “has been a dying business for 5,000 years.” Whether he’s recounting anecdotes from Ben Franklin about early publishing, sharing the difficulties of today’s independent bookstores as they try to survive amid behemoths like Amazon, or illuminating the passions of authors like Ann Patchett, who own their own bookstores– listeners can count on Myers to maintain their engagement”. —AudioFile