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A History of Bookselling from the Dawn of Print to the Twenty-First Century
by Andrew Pettegree
The global history of the rise and transformation of bookstores, from medieval book merchants to today's neighborhood indies.
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.
"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
This information about The Bookshop was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Andrew Pettegree is a professor of modern history at the University of St. Andrews. A leading expert on the history of books and other media, Pettegree is the award-winning author of several books, including The Book at War: How Reading Shaped Conflict and Conflict Shaped Reading and The Library: A Fragile History (with Arthur der Weduwen). He lives in Scotland.
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