The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore

＂Bookstores have always been unlike any other kind of store, shaping readers and writers, and influencing our tastes, thoughts, and politics. 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 those stakes: what has been, and what might be lost. Evan Friss’s history ... draws on oral histories, archival collections, municipal records, diaries, letters, catalogs, and interviews with leading booksellers to offer a ... look at this institution beloved by so many--not just as a merchant, but as a gathering place for likeminded people who cherish books＂--

Evan Friss is an Associate Professor of History at James Madison University, a scholar of American and Urban History, and the author of two books: The Cycling City: Bicycles and Urban America in the 1890s and On Bicycles: A 200-Year History of Cycling in New York City. His research has been profiled in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Slate, the New York Post, National Geographic, and The Economist.