“If bookstores were animals, they’d be on the list of endangered species,” notes author and historian Evan Friss in The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore. While endangered, bookstores are also, as Friss convincingly argues, resilient, powerful places with the capacity to anchor communities, shape lives and bring people together.
Friss sets the stage for his entertaining romp through history with an introductory portrait of Three Lives & Company, a cozy independent bookshop in Manhattan’s West Village with 6,000 books crammed into hand-carved shelves, and colorful booksellers who have worked there for decades and “keep track of inventory by hand, jotting down titles sold on yellow notepads.” Friss was more than a loyal customer there. When he married bookseller Amanda, the shop closed for the occasion.
Friss doesn’t neglect facts and figures, which can be depressing for those of us who could never quite enjoy You’ve Got Mail. We learn, for example, that the U.S. Census Bureau reported 13,499 bookstores in 1993; by 2021, the figure had dropped to 5,591. However, more than anything, Friss is a storyteller. Each chapter introduces us to fascinating, dedicated booksellers, including the multitalented Benjamin Franklin, who had a bookshop before bookselling businesses were widespread in the colonies. Friss tells us, “He was a shopkeeper who sold books (retail and wholesale), a printer (and sometimes binder), an editor (and sometimes author), a marketer, a publisher, and a postmaster—roles that blurred.”
Friss goes on to browse through the history of American bookstores in chapters that cover Chicago’s Marshall Field’s, the country’s “first book superstore,” as well as the last bastion on New York City’s erstwhile Book Row, the Strand. Having started with Franklin, it’s fitting that Friss’ final chapter focuses on another writer-bookseller: Ann Patchett. Patchett was already a successful author when she co-founded Nashville’s Parnassus Books with Karen Hayes in 2011. Friss tells us that Parnassus, along with other indies such as Word Up in New York City’s Washington Heights neighborhood known as “Little Dominican Republic,” and Solid State Books, a Black-owned bookstore in Washington, D.C., have built loyal followings that have (mostly) enabled them to weather the COVID-19 pandemic—and Amazon.
Will the unique animal of the independent bookshop survive? In many ways, Friss suggests, that’s up to readers and book lovers—to us.
