"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"--
