The Bookshop

I loved reading about the history of the American bookstore. Evan Friss travels back in time and around the nation to show the history and current status of the bookshop. It amazing how much has changed but how much more has stayed the same. It seems as though there has always been an imminent disaster awaiting bookstores in the form of new technology, declining readership, and bigger and badder competitors. I was struck at the importance of organization for a store, how placement can literally change how "people thought about books, they way they related to one another, and which books customers discovered." I thought the most helpful information was in looking at the failures of Amazon to start their own string of bookstores. They shuttered them all in March 2022. This book made me reminisce about my various bookstore visits across the USA over the past 30 years. It brought back fond memories.