The Bookshop

Evan Friss opens his history of the American bookstore with Benjamin Franklin's shop in colonial Philadelphia. He carries it forward more than two centuries, to Amazon Books and today's independent revival. A historian at James Madison University, Friss builds the book from archives, oral histories and interviews with working booksellers rather than trade statistics alone.

Thirteen stores anchor the chapters. The Strand and the Gotham Book Mart carry the New York sections, and Marshall Field's book department stands in for Chicago. The Oscar Wilde Bookshop, Drum and Spear, sidewalk used book carts, Barnes and Noble and Parnassus each get a chapter of their own, and every chapter follows one shop's rise and, often, its closing.

Friss treats a bookstore as a gathering place first and a retailer second. He follows how black, feminist and LGBTQ shops built communities that most trade histories skip over. The telling stays anecdotal rather than academic: booksellers argue with publishers, chase rent and improvise to keep their doors open.

It suits a reader curious about book culture, retail history or the life of an American city. It suits, too, anyone who has spent an afternoon lost in somebody's stacks. Kirkus and Publishers Weekly both starred it on release.