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The Bookshop

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What to expect

The global history of the rise and transformation of bookstores, from medieval book merchants to today’s neighborhood indies.

"This is the arresting and ultimately optimistic story of the making and marketing of print culture. Here is a book for every book-lover to buy.” -Jeff Jarvis, author The Gutenberg Parenthesis

Whether it’s a local indie bookshop, an online megaretailer, or a chain bookstore, the place we buy books is an essential part of our reading lives. Bookstores connect books to potential buyers and convert idle browsers into committed readers. Yet, as historian Andrew Pettegree reveals, it took more than five centuries after Gutenberg for bookstores as we know them to emerge.

The Bookshop tells a sweeping history of the bookstore. It celebrates the ingenuity of booksellers, from the smugglers who carried contraband books across borders, to the innovators who created the global distribution networks that define books and bookselling today. Even though few bookshops lasted more than a few years during the best of times, booksellers relentlessly sought new ways to get books to readers. Innovators like the squabbling dealers who invented the secondhand bookstore, or Victorian capitalists like W. H. Smith, who built an empire of railroad station book stalls to serve idle passengers, made bookselling what it is today.

The Bookshop is the story of how the bookstore became the indispensable meeting place for book makers and book lovers around the world.

Critics Review

“Andrew Pettegree, the dean of book historians, turns his attention to a too-long neglected aspect of the field: bookselling. In a thoroughly engaging and deeply researched narrative, he traces the sale of books by printers, pedlars, and priests, from stalls in St. Paul’s Churchyard to gilded department stores, from train stations to chain stores and ultimately Amazon. Pettegree chronicles the resilience of the trade in the face of censorship, banishment, and bankruptcy. This is the arresting and ultimately optimistic story of the making and marketing of print culture. Here is a book for every book-lover to buy.”—Jeff Jarvis, author The Gutenberg Parenthesis
“Scholars know a lot about how books are made and read. We know less about the selling that forms a link between the two. Andrew Pettegree‘s new book elegantly fills that gap. Its broad chronological reach provides a lively account of what's both recognizable and strange about the way books found their way to owners and readers at other times and places. The results will make you think differently about the path through which this book reached your hands.”—Leah Price, author of What We Talk About When We Talk About Books
“In this wide-ranging work, Andrew Pettegree, an outstanding historian of the printed word, traces all the ways that books reached readers, from peddlers’ packs to the internet. His masterful survey brings together information on the book trade in many countries since the time of Gutenberg. The Bookshop will delight anyone who has shopped for books.”—Robert Darnton, author of The Great Cat Massacre

“A unique and fascinating chronicle of the origins of bookselling and the development of the bookstores we know and love today. The Bookshop is an important contribution to the canon of literary history.”

—Molly Guptill Manning, New York Times bestselling author of When Books Went to War
Author Andrew Pettegree
Narrator Sean Barrett
Duration 11 hours
Release Date
ISBN 9781668659045
Format Audiobook
Publisher Hachette Audio
Genre European history, General and world history, Language: reference and general, Literature: history and criticism, Social and cultural history
Availability US

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