The individual episodes are compelling. They brim with telling details: Benjamin Franklin among “fat kegs of ink, cases of type (he used Caslon but preferred Baskerville), reams of paper, pages dangling from the ceiling to dry, and heaps of rags,” at a time when bookstore wasn’t yet a word and The New Printing-Office was a printer, post office, and paper seller that also sold some books. We leap from the eighteenth century to the nineteenth century with The Old Corner, run by a young William D. Ticknor and an even younger James T. Fields. There was a very small market for books: “few people read for leisure.” In 1832, “there were only 1,553 American-published books in print.” But these two fledgling booksellers became the publisher Ticknor and Fields, and out of The Old Corner they published Lydia Maria Child, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Atlantic Monthly, and Tick’s close friend, Nathaniel Hawthorne, who wrote in the store. Upon reviewing a work of hers, Fields told Louisa May Alcott to stick to teaching. She went on to write Little Women.
And on it goes. By the fourth chapter we’re squarely in the twentieth century with Field’s, the epic Chicago department store, which had “68 elevators, 127,000 feet of pneumatic tubing, thousands of employees, and 700 horses standing by for delivery,” along with its “Czarina” of books, Marcella Hahner, a tiny woman with outsize influence on the literary field. The portrait of Hahner and Gotham Book Mart’s Frances Steloff—who, among much else, held a wake for the launch of Finnegans Wake and sold contraband books from beneath the counter, such as Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer to future Grove Press impresario Barney Rosset—are among The Bookshop’s most memorable.
He might evade argument, but Friss leaves crumbs that lead us to one. He is less interested in investigating how bookstores might survive than in asking: How should a bookshop be? In the dead center of his book, Friss reveals a commitment to evenhandedness that, under light pressure, becomes the sinister proclivity for false equivalences of the well-meaning liberal.
Friss reminds readers that, from the colonial period through the present, bookbuying, especially at bookstores, has been the province of “the well-educated and the upper classes.” But as sociologist Laura J. Miller argues in her classic study of American bookselling, Reluctant Capitalists, in the twentieth century, innovations in the trade expanded the classes of people who might buy books. Starting in the 1920s, the Book-of-the-Month Club made literature more accessible to the middle class. When Pocket Books created the modern mass-market format in 1939, it made literature into mass culture—even if you were unlikely to find the small, cheaply made books in most bookstores, intimidating places known to judge a customer’s taste and recommend toward moral uplift.