‘The Bookshop’ by Andrew Pettegree review

Few commercial enterprises possess as much romance as the bookshop. From the teetering warrens of secondhand dealers to the sprawling floors of Foyles on Charing Cross Road, they are places of promise and serendipity. At Wigtown in Scotland, the Open Book lets visitors stay in the flat above the shop and run it for a week. What might normally be counted as employment is turned into a holiday that one pays for, and is popular enough to be booked out for three years in advance. Certainly, not many people fantasise about leaving their jobs to start up a branch of Tesco or Zara.

Andrew Pettegree’s new book undoes some of the romance to show the precarity and hard graft that has shadowed the industry over the last 600 years. As with many new technologies, the first century after the invention of print saw a litany of bankruptcies, as printers invested capital without yet having a model for selling and distributing copies in bulk. And even after it was more established, the book trade ‘float[ed] perilously on a submerged mountain of credit and debt’, as vulnerable to wider economic or political turmoil as any other business.

While at the top were titans such as John Murray, who published Jane Austen and Walter Scott, hosted a literary salon, and founded a seven-generation dynasty, much of the story Pettegree tells is far less glamorous. He underlines the significance of books being sold in railway stalls and general stores, alongside stationery, tobacco, and bags of flour. Indeed, while they may be far removed from the cultural conversation, a large volume of bestsellers continue to move through airports and supermarkets today. More remote communities, from the Scottish Highlands to colonial America, were primarily served by street hawkers and peddlers, who braved shifting vagrancy laws, bad weather, worse roads, and unfriendly wholesalers to ply their trade. The first fleet of travelling door-to-door salesmen in the US was assembled to promote the Personal Memoirs of former president Ulysses S. Grant – and had their own printed manual of techniques for how to do so (present it as an opportunity; play on buyers’ patriotism; don’t leave without payment; always smile), which succeeded in shifting 325,000 copies. Pettegree holds that despite the challenges, there was always room for the charismatic entrepreneur – Jeff Bezos here somewhat contentiously counted among them – to triumph over the odds.

For much of the history of print, the roles of printer, publisher, and bookseller overlapped and intersected in hard-to-detangle ways. Publishers such as Persephone have their own bookshops, while booksellers such as Blackwell’s have run their own imprints. The story that Pettegree tells is therefore of the book trade as a whole rather than of bookshops as such. He spends little time on the physical spaces themselves, or on the experience of working or shopping in them. There are mentions of the importance of browsing (and of judging books by their covers), but not the very invention of ‘shopping’ as a leisure activity in the late 18th century, nor its social implications. One example is the ‘Temple of the Muses’, a vast emporium operated by James Lackington in London from 1778. Pettegree notes the breadth and cheapness of its stock (numbering half a million copies at its peak), which Lackington achieved by pioneering discounting practices that resembled today’s ‘remainder’ stores. But the Temple of the Muses was equally remarkable for the galleries of bookshelves and ‘lounging rooms’ that made it a fashionable destination in its own right. An engraving of 1828 shows the circular counter surrounded by well-dressed ladies and gentlemen in conversation, more intent on each other than on the books. Clearly, Regency couples found a bookshop as conducive to courtship as their 1990s romcom counterparts.

As a founding director of the Universal Short Title Catalogue – ‘a collective catalogue of all the books published in Europe and its overseas colonies between the invention of printing and 1700’ – Pettegree’s account abounds in lists and statistics. As with the USTC, his book has geographical limits, with England, France, Germany, and, in later chapters, the US taking centre stage. But this is plenty of sweep, ranging from the papyrus scroll sellers of ancient Rome through the birth of international copyright, censorship, the antiquarian trade, the railways, two world wars, the rise and decline of the big chains, and the dominance of Amazon.

There is little room to pause on personalities among the data. The occasional human story does flash by, showing some of the ways that bookselling intersected with people’s lives over the centuries. The author Samuel Johnson, having refused to man the family market bookstall as a stroppy youth, would return to the spot after his father’s death to stand vigil in the pouring rain. In rural Vermont at the end of the 18th century, book-starved villagers had to wait for the rivers to freeze so they could get reading material for the long winters delivered by ‘the first sleighing’.

But anyone wanting more such anecdotes, whether about the nefarious ‘ring’ of rare-book auction manipulators or the book-stealing gangs of 1920s New York, is advised to consult the bibliography: Pettegree tends to be more generous to his sources than his readers. In a half-page description of the 19th-century antiquarian Thomas Frognall Dibdin – who first coined the term bibliomania and encouraged its excesses among the aristocracy – he notes that Dibdin was ‘a frustrating man’ with a particularly ‘excitable’ tone, but provides no examples for the reader to judge. It is only the work cited in the footnotes (a chapter by John A. Sibbald) that memorably calls Dibdin a ‘book bitch to the rich’. For the author to resist borrowing such a formulation is an act of self denial that few of the successful booksellers in this book would have emulated.

• The Bookshop: A History of Bookselling From the Dawn of Print to the 21st Century
  Andrew Pettegree
  Profile, 320pp, £25
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

Natasha Simonova writes on 18th-century literature.