Evan Friss — The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore - with Bradley Graham
August 21, 2024
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55:24Now PlayingEvan Friss — The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore - with Bradley Graham
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as posted by the channelWatch author Evan Friss' book talk and reading at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C.
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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 the stakes: what has been, and what might be lost.
Evan Friss's history of the bookshop draws on oral histories, archival collections, municipal records, diaries, letters, and interviews with leading booksellers to offer a fascinating look at this institution beloved by so many. The story begins with Benjamin Franklin's first bookstore in Philadelphia and takes us to a range of booksellers including the Strand, Chicago's Marshall Field & Company, the Gotham Book Mart, specialty stores like Oscar Wilde and Drum and Spear, sidewalk sellers of used books, Barnes & Noble, Amazon Books, and Parnassus. The Bookshop is also a history of the leading figures in American bookselling, often impassioned eccentrics, and a history of how books have been marketed and sold over the course of more than two centuries--including, for example, a 3,000-pound elephant who signed books at Marshall Field's in 1944.
The Bookshop is a love letter to bookstores, a charming chronicle for anyone who cherishes these sanctuaries of literature, and essential reading to understand how these vital institutions have shaped American life--and why we still need them.
Evan Friss is a professor of history at James Madison University and the author of two other books: The Cycling City: Bicycles and Urban America in the 1890s and On Bicycles: A 200-Year History of Cycling in New York City. He lives with his wife (a bookseller) and two children (occasional booksellers) in Harrisonburg, Virginia.
Friss is in conversation with Bradley Graham. Graham is co-owner of Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington, DC. He and his wife, Lissa Muscatine, assumed ownership of P&P in 2011. Previously, Brad spent 30 years with The Washington Post as a reporter and editor focused mostly on foreign and national security affairs. He also has written two books---Hit to Kill, an account published in 2001 of renewed U.S. efforts to build a national missile defense system, and By His Own Rules, a biography of Donald Rumsfeld published in 2009
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Founded by Carla Cohen and Barbara Meade in 1984, Politics and Prose Bookstore is Washington, D.C.'s premier independent bookstore and cultural hub, a gathering place for people interested in reading and discussing books. Politics and Prose offers superior service, unusual book choices, and a haven for book lovers in the store and online.
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