The United States has had a bookstore problem since before the nation’s founding. There have never been enough. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, books were sold mostly by printers, like Franklin, whose store was in Philadelphia, or publishers, such as Ticknor & Fields, which operated the Old Corner Bookstore, in Boston. (Ticknor & Fields later became part of Houghton Mifflin.) Because there were few places for customers to get books, some entrepreneurs figured out ways to get books to them. There was a book barge on the Erie Canal in the early nineteenth century, for example, and there were book caravans—vehicles outfitted to display books for sale—until well into the twentieth century.
Even after the distribution of books improved, it was not easy to get your hands on new ones unless you lived in a major city or a college town. In 1939, about a hundred and eighty million books were produced, in one estimate, but only twenty-eight hundred stores sold them. Books were also sold in gift shops that stocked a few titles or department stores that offered discounted books as a loss leader to attract a tonier class of customer.
Americans could buy books by mail directly from publishers, and they could subscribe to book clubs, such as the Book-of-the-Month Club, which was founded in 1926, or its rival, the Literary Guild, founded in 1927 and once owned by Doubleday. (Those clubs still exist. They print their own editions, which they sell for well below the publisher’s retail price.) But most people had no way to browse new books.
One reason for the distribution problem is that each book is a unique good. It is handcrafted by a writer and a postproduction team of editors and designers. Even in 1939, there were too many new titles for a small shop to stock—an estimated 10,640, and that doesn’t include perennial sellers, like Bibles and dictionaries, or classics.
And, unless you are a “just looking for something to read on the beach” kind of customer, there are usually no acceptable substitutes. When you go to a supermarket, the store may carry two brands of milk or ten. It doesn’t matter. You just want milk. But book buying doesn’t work that way. You want the book you want. If the choice was between doing without and mailing a check to a publisher in New York City (publishers, stupidly, did not have warehouses in the middle of the country), many people probably chose to do without. This was not a sensible way to run a business.