This story first appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette August 3, 2024.

The story of books in America is the story of people in America. And, sometimes, the story of animals.

“The Bookshop,” Evan Friss’s history of the book retail business, includes the didn’t-see-that-coming tale of Judy, a 3,000-pound elephant who signed books (with a stamp that dangled from her trunk, obviously) at Marshall Field’s booming books department in 1944.

Judy, who was there to launch a book that came with elephant puzzle pieces, also did tricks, but would not get back into the freight elevator after her signing. The ensuing hubbub inspired its own children’s book. Just another day in the life of a bookseller.

Friss’s book takes readers on an American journey, from fancy bookshops to expansive mall shops, as well as tiny shops run by bookworms (and includes asides such as why you should never — gasp! — call them bookstores). It covers a vast amount of ground, from people selling rare and old books to folks who hawk paperbacks on the sidewalk.

Each chapter is about a bookshop that represents an important theme in American bookselling history. Friss does a marvelous job setting the scene at each shop, which includes authors, non-authors and celebrities who stop in. It’s the people who help place each shop in the American story.

For example, Ida Steloff, known as Fanny, who was born in 1887 to Russian-born Yiddish-speaking parents in New York, opened the Gotham Book Mart. She lived on the third floor above the shop, often slept outside on her balcony, and was known to have a pencil tucked in her hair or behind her ear at all times.

As Friss points out, like many bookshops, this one served many needs and was “more than a home and more than a bookshop. It was a museum, art gallery, therapist’s couch, disheveled English professor’s office, grandmother’s living room, and Parisian cafe, all wrapped in one.”

Of the characters in the book, she is a powerhouse. Among friends who stopped by were Charlie Chaplin, Rudolph Valentino and Martha Graham. When Steloff’s marriage ended in 1930, she was smart to make sure she held control of the shop and continued to operate in a field dominated by men. She pioneered little magazines, which we would probably call zines today, including authors such as James Joyce and his Works in Progress, which included parts of “Finnegans Wake.”

Friss shows us how bookshops nurture local communities by providing shared spaces for intellectual discourse and cultural exchange. However, they now face a potential decline in their significance.

While the story covers myriad bookshops, it is by no means exhaustive or comprehensive, which the author acknowledges at the beginning. Everyone has a favorite bookshop and to cover them all would be impossible, but Friss chooses well and the book’s organization will make sense to someone who hasn’t visited any of the bookshops he writes about. He even apologizes early on to those who feel left out.

“To you, dear reader, who thumbs through the index and finds no mention of your beloved bookstore: I’m sorry,” he writes. “Your disappointment is, in fact, part of this very story. That so many people feel differently about their bookstore than they do about their grocery store or electronic store or any other store is part of the point.”

“The Bookshop” is a paean to those magical places and is a must-read to understand why bookshops have been such an integral part of American life for so long, and why they — even in an age of social media — remain an “influencer” today.

Meredith Cummings is a freelance journalist and teaching assistant professor of journalism at Lehigh University.