Good evening.

Welcome to another edition of Inside the Cover.

We are so pleased t have you join us for tonight's discussion.

Subtitled “A History of the American Bookshop”, I found The Bookshop by Evan Friss to be informational and entertaining.

Friss writes with a light and conversational touch that offers a lot of substance and detail while remaining extremely readable.

It is now time to go inside the cover.

Evan Friss is a professor of history at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia.

He is the author of two other books.

The Bookshop was copyrighted in 2024, and I finished my copy on December 8th, 2024.

The chapters of this book, are set in a bookshop or book delivery system that represent an important theme in American bookselling history, on that anchors broader discussions and speaks to a larger narrative about the power of bookshops and American's changing relationship with them, from the small shops to the massive internet presence of Amazon.

I enjoyed reading about booksellers such as Benjamin Franklin, William D. Ticknor and James Fields, who operated the Old Corner Bookstore in Boston, which Friss calls “the birth of the American bookstore”, and Marcella Burns Hahner, who was the buyer, manager and face of the bookstore located in Marshall Field's department store in Chicago.

Friss note that “Marshall Fields represents a critical moment in American bookselling history.

For while department stores and their book sections would eventually fall out of favor, the book business, especially the biggest publishers, the biggest booksellers, th biggest authors, kept biggering.

In essence, Field was the first book superstore.” I enjoyed reading abou bookstores that we have visited and shopped in.

For example, the Strand in Ne York City, Powells in Portland.

The Tattered Cover in Denver, Shakespeare and Company in Paris, and the Barnes and Noble on Fifth Avenue in New York.

I was educated about the Oscar Wild Memorial Bookstore in New York, one of the first bookstores t openly serve the gay community.

I learned about the Aryan Bookstore, which opened in Los Angeles in March of 1933.

According to Friss, it was much more than a place to buy something.

It was the de fact headquarters of American Nazism.

I also read about the Drum and Spear bookstore in Washington, D.C.

Again, according to the author, It was one of the nation's leading black bookstores.

It had an agenda.

It pushed certain titles and denounced others.

It was, as the founder called it, a movement bookstore.

It was also fun to read abou authors who became booksellers, such as Larry McMurtry and Ann Patchett.

Patchett has been called the patro saint of independent bookstores.

Her store in Nashville, Parnassus, is a Mecca for fledgling booksellers, including a friend of mine who, after visiting with Patchett, subsequently opened Flint Hill Books in Council Grove, Kansas.

Why a book about bookshops?

Well, they can be romantic spaces, places full of discovery, of chance, of wonder.

They can be community spaces, activist spaces, political spaces.

What better subject for a quality read?

While Friss notes that there are some 352 books about bookstores, as a reader and a book lover, I found this one to be a book of joyful merit.

Friss write with a sincerity and enthusiasm that I found compelling and engaging, and I am pleased to share it with you, with a very favorable recommendation.

That's our show.

As always, it was a pleasure to visit and share, and I look forward to our next visit.

In the meantime, think abou visiting your favorite bookshop.

Good night.