The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore

by Evan Friss

That bookstores continue to endure is, in some ways, something of a miracle. Pundits predicted they would be long dead. So did booksellers. One joked that books have “been a dying business for at least five thousand years.” That comment was made in 1961, a time that subsequent booksellers would refer to as a golden age.

It was Franklin who edited the Declaration of Independence (he changed Jefferson’s “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable” to “We hold these truths to be self-evident”),

The Old Corner helped launch American literature and the American bookstore. Now it’s a Chipotle.

“I advise every woman in the world to sell books,”

In 1969, Fred Bass anticipated that books would one day become electronic: “You’ll have a telephone with a screen and you’ll be able to dial a book.”