The Art of Bookselling

×

Expand

https://charlestonlibrarysociety.org/event/the-art-of-bookselling/

The Art of Bookselling

One cannot happen upon a book they didn’t know about, nor could you experience a personalized book signing following a talk if there were not bookstores, book owners or environments where books are the star. Having before written previously about bicycles (another tradition worthy of staunch support), Evan Friss makes a spirited case for the ever-enduring need for bookshops, and the people who run them. This love letter to the American bookstore gives needed space to its central place in our cultural life – shaping readers and writers, influencing our tastes, thoughts, and politics. Beginning with Benjamin Franklin’s first bookstore in Philadelphia, through to the Strand, Marshall Field & Co., Gotham Book Mart, Oscar Wilde and Drum and Spear, sidewalk used booksellers and many more, The Bookshop shares what has been, and what is at risk – a charming chronicle for anyone who cherishes these sanctuaries of literature (as we do!), and essential reading to inform how these vital institutions have shaped us and why we still need them.

If you are unable to attend the event but would like to purchase one or more signed copies, please visit Buxton Books here.

About Evan Friss

Evan Friss is a professor of history at James Madison University and the author of two other books: The Cycling City: Bicycles and Urban America in the 1890s and On Bicycles: A 200-Year History of Cycling in New York City. He lives with his wife (a bookseller) and two children (occasional booksellers) in Harrisonburg, Virginia.

About the Book

An affectionate and engaging history of the American bookstore and its central place in American cultural life, from department stores to indies, from highbrow dealers trading in first editions to sidewalk vendors, and from chains to special-interest community destinations. Bookstores have always been unlike any other kind of store. 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 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.