The bookshop is the pool-hall for nerds. For those of us who look upon books as near-sacred objects and the places where they are sold as temples of sorts, bookshops are places of pleasure, education, and camaraderie, and as such are indispensable to the good life.
Note please I write "bookshops," not "bookstores." A store you enter knowing what it is you want—groceries, hardware, pharmaceuticals—you purchase it, and depart. In a shop you browse, you engage in conversation with the owner or salespeople, you make discoveries you hadn’t previously known existed, you meet people with interests similar to your own, you hang out. In "The Bookshop in America," an essay of 1963, Edward Shils wrote: "I have gone to bookshops to buy and browse. I have gone to them to buy books I wanted, and because I just wanted to buy a book, and much of the time I wanted to be among books to inhale their presence."
The problem just now is that they, bookshops, are in danger of going under. In his In Praise of Good Bookstores, Jeff Deutsch notes that in 1994 there were roughly 7,000 bookshops in America, though by 2019 that number had been reduced to roughly 2,500. The reduction is owing, among other things, to the rise of Amazon.com as the principal purveyor of books, the spread of digital culture with its many distractions, and the reduction of reading generally in a country that has never harbored a vast readership.
Evan Friss’s The Bookshop, A History of the American Bookstore recounts in lively prose the roller-coaster history of the bookshop in America, with occasional forays into bookshop culture in Europe. A professor of history at James Madison University, Friss lards his book with interesting facts, many previously unknown to me. Some notable among them include: The first use of the word "book store" came in 1760. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense was America’s first bestseller. Benjamin Franklin was the first publisher in America to print a novel, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela. The Old Corner, a once famous Boston bookshop, is now the site of a Chipotle. Actors tend not to be readers.
Nor, oddly, do booksellers tend to be readers. What, then, is in it for the strange but interesting breed who undergo the commercial risk of opening and running bookshops? Edward Shils again: "It takes a special kind of person, somewhat daft in a socially useful and quite pleasant way but nonetheless somewhat off his head, to give himself to bookselling. Why should anyone who has or can obtain $10,000 or $20,000 invest it in a bookshop to sell serious books when, if he were an economically reasonable person, he would do better to open a beauty parlor or a hamburger and barbecue shop or put his money into the stock market. The bookseller must be one of those odd people who just love the proximity of books."
Fifteen years ago there were seven bookshops within walking distance of my apartment in Evanston: two chains (Barnes & Noble and Borders), one academic shop (called Great Expectations), and four used-book shops. Today there are two, one selling new books, one used. (Borders, which began life in Ann Arbor in 1971, declared bankruptcy in 2011, and Barnes & Noble, Evan Friss notes, recently closed 1,614 of its stores.) I visit the used bookshop with some frequency, the new one less often. Toward the end of The Bookshop, Evan Friss provides the following saddening statistics: Between 2012 and 2021, "the number of bookstores dropped by 34 percent," while the number of Americans working in a bookstore "fell by 53 percent"; the average American spent only $30 annually on books; and "44.5 percent of adults didn’t read a single book, apart from those assigned on the job or at school."
Rich though The Bookshop is in both detail and statistics, Mr. Friss might have made a clearer distinction than he does among new and used bookshops. (Technically a used book is one that has passed through other hands on its ways to the used-book shop.) Some famous bookshops have handled both. My recollection is that the splendid Gotham Book Mart, run in mid-Manhattan by Frances Steloff, a shop whose extraordinary owner is profiled in The Bookshop, was such a shop. Friss also devotes several pages to Marshall Field Department Store’s great book department in Chicago, the Strand in New York, Shakespeare & Company in Paris. (Blackwell’s in London is the only major bookshop that goes neglected in his pages.) The richest vein of used bookshops, which Ethan Friss also considers, was the run of shops in Manhattan along Fourth Avenue between 8th and 14th streets. As a young man working at a magazine on 15th Street and Fifth Avenue, I haunted these shops on my lunch hours with the ardor of a drunken sailor, home after two years at sea, wandering along a red-light district.
Used-book shops figure to be richer in content than new. Their contents after all are drawn from all of world literature through all ages. One comes upon books in them, some long out of print, unavailable in new bookshops. I myself have in recent years discovered in used bookshops the works of Polybius, Gaston Bossier, Sainte-Beuve. Next to a well-stocked used bookshop, a new bookshop, with its current-day sideline in the sale of coffee-cups, pens, calendars, notebooks, and games can seem thin. How many new books are likely to stand the test of time that most books in used bookshops seem to have done. But, then, I may be a touch prejudiced here, even though I have published more than my own share of new books, from the days when I was standing next to my then-friend Saul Bellow, as he dropped a dozen or so new books, sent to him in the hope that he would provide blurbs for them, down the incinerator of his apartment building in Hyde Park in Chicago, declaring "I’m the Torquemada of the 12th floor."
If The Bookshop has a theme, apart from that of the decline if not yet fall of the American bookshop, it is that the bookshop tends to be multifunctional. One of its functions, described over many pages in the book, is that of a center, sometimes a headquarters, for various cultural and ethnic groups. Among those Evan Friss takes up are feminist, black, gay, and radical bookshops. From an earlier day, he also cites communist bookshops and even a Los Angeles bookshop of the early 1930s called The Aryan Book Store, the latter given over to promulgating fascist books and ideology. During the Joseph McCarthy and House Un-American Activities Committee days, some bookshops specializing in radical literature were put on the government’s list of subversive organizations.
Evan Friss sees the emergence of politics through bookshops as a sign of the further centrality, salience, and significance of the bookshop. Here we disagree. Political ideology, even if it be close to one’s own, in my view diminishes the bookshop. Literature has its own ideology, which is above the merely political. This ideology embraces a wider culture—wider and deeper. Nietzsche captures my point when he writes:
Political and economic affairs are not worthy of being the enforced concern of society's most gifted spirits: such a wasteful use of the spirit is at bottom worse than having none at all. They are and remain domains for lesser heads, and others than lesser heads ought not to be in the service of these workshops: better for the machinery to fall to pieces again! But as things now stand, with everybody believing he is obliged to know what is taking place here every day and neglecting his own work in order to be continually participating in it, the whole arrangement has become a great and ludicrous piece of insanity.
The bookshop, both new and used, currently stands in peril, from politics on one side, from digital culture on the other. If feminism-racialism-gaiety-radicalism don’t sink it, Kindles, tablets, computers, and cell phones may well do so. A crucial battle of the future figures to be that between pixels and print. If pixels win, we can expect cityscapes devoid of all bookshops. Not, for those booklovers among us, a happy prospect.
The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore
by Evan Friss
Viking, 416 pp., $30
Joseph Epstein is the author, most recently, of The Novel, Who Needs It? (Encounter Books).