Inside the Nooks of ‘The Bookshop’

Photo by Joanna Morrissey

When Evan Friss ’02 and his wife, Amanda, lived in Manhattan, she worked in just such a bookstore: Three Lives and Company, a West Village mainstay since 1978. That establishment (and the stories Amanda would tell about its customers, like the Broadway composer who’d turn lines randomly chosen from different books into songs) inspired Friss, now a professor of history at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va., to investigate “where bookstores came from and how they evolved over time, and what they’ve meant to American society and what might be lost if they disappear,” he says.

That’s the plotline he follows in “The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore,” released this week by Viking. In it, Friss acts as a literary tour guide, ferrying readers from a bustling publishing house/bookstore in 18^th-century Boston to Prohibition-era Chicago, where a luxurious department store staged opulent displays to market new releases, to Midtown Manhattan in the mid-20^th century, home to an iconoclastic bookstore that catered to the city’s avant-garde. (One store that doesn’t make the official itinerary is the one Amanda opened while Evan was working on this book: Parentheses in Harrisonburg, Va.)

“The Bookshop” is “organized like the best of such literary emporiums: a little higgledy-piggledy, with surprise diversions here and there,” wrote Alexandra Jacobs in The New York Times. Here are three of its takeaways.

• Aesthetics have always mattered. Sure, arranging your books in color groupings may be a product of the Instagram age. But putting effort into making books look beautiful isn’t. Even in 1855, James Fields, who along with William D. Ticknor owned publishing house and bookstore The Old Corner in Boston, wrote that “our customers take up the book and then put it down simply on account of the binding.” Fields and Ticknor began insisting their books have gilded edges, gold ornamentation on the spine, and the title and author’s name in gold.
  
  Marcella Burns Hahner, the head of Marshall Field’s book division known as “the czarina” both for her power and her tyrannical tendencies, would transform the department store into wonderland scenes. For a 1922 “Spirit of Spring” theme, “the book section resembled an outdoor garden,” writes Friss. “Along the main aisle, books circled hydrangea centerpieces like mulch. Taxidermy bird mounts stood atop hills of books.”

• Women have long found professional success in bookstores. From the country’s beginnings, women have been essential to the book-selling business. Deborah Read, common-law wife of Benjamin Franklin, often ran the couple’s Philadelphia bookstore while her “husband—postmaster, writer, printer, bookseller, heavy reader, and occasional napper—was frequently otherwise engaged,” writes Friss.
  
  From Read to Hahner to Fanny Steloff, the late owner of New York City’s eccentric (and now closed) Gotham Book Mart, women have a special place in the history of the bookstore. It’s partly a holdover from the spread of public libraries after the Civil War, says Friss. Librarian—and later, bookseller—became an acceptable occupation for women. “Some of it had to do with the same ideologies behind women as teachers,” says Friss. “These were spaces to educate people—children would come in, and it kind of plays into the motherhood motif.” (Plus, data repeatedly show that women generally read more books than men.)

• Bookstores are resilient. In 1961, writes Friss, a bookseller joked that books have “been a dying business for at least five thousand years.” In the 19^th century, booksellers worried about public libraries. Then they thought radio would kill them. Then the movies, television, superstores and the internet.
  
  “Bookstores have found ways to reinvent themselves,” says Friss. “They’ve just had to usually dance a little faster and invent some new ways of generating money.”