In my ✨ highly ambitious and slightly chaotic ✨ project to read every 2024 Goodreads Choice Award winner (because why not torture myself with genres I usually avoid 😂), I stumbled onto The Bookshop by Evan Friss…
AND OMG 🫶 THIS. WAS. THE. BEST. DECISION. EVER.
As someone who loves spending hours in cozy book cafes ☕📚 (and who may or may not secretly plan to open one someday with fairy lights and hidden nooks 🧚♀️✨), this book was like a giant warm hug. It’s a love letter to every bibliophile’s dream. 🥹
📚✨ Scroll down for a list of bookstores mentioned in the final chapter — spoiler alert: they’re all (or were!) owned by famous authors! 💬💥 Bookish dreams, incoming!
👉 Goodreads Blurb:
“An affectionate and engaging history of the American bookstore and its central place in American cultural life… from Benjamin Franklin’s first store to Amazon Books, via iconic indies like The Strand and Gotham Book Mart. The Bookshop draws from rich archival material to celebrate the evolution—and endangered magic—of bookstores.”
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 those 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, 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 more than two centuries—including, for example, a 3,000-pound elephant who appeared to sign 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.
🏷️ Genre: Nonfiction 📚; History 🏛️;
🚨 Trigger Warnings: None! (Unless you count heartbreak over closed bookstores 😭)
✍️ Review:
📚 Plot / Structure:
Unlike a dry academic history (which, let’s be real, I feared), this book FLOWS like a beautifully told story. 🌊 Evan Friss weaves together adorable anecdotes 🐘 with deeply fascinating cultural shifts 📜, from Franklin’s printing days to the rise (and sometimes sad fall) of bookstore legends.
Each chapter felt like wandering into a different quirky bookstore aisle—some familiar, some wildly unexpected (Aryan Bookstore?? Yikes 😬). And there’s even a chapter about the smell of bookstores 🥰📖 (scientifically proven magic, I’m convinced).
🧑🤝🧑 Characters / People:
Okay, technically nonfiction = no fictional characters… but THE PEOPLE!!!
Friss introduces unforgettable real-life legends: from Marcella Burns Hahner (aka “The Czarina” who literally dragged customers to buy books 😂) to powerhouse booksellers shaping not just bookstores but publishing history itself.
And let’s not forget all the quirky, passionate, slightly bonkers booksellers that make you want to immediately apply for a job at Three Lives & Company.
🌎 Setting / Atmosphere:
America’s bookstore landscape is a full-on character here. 🗺️ Every city, every little dusty shop, every massive superstore like Marshall Field’s feels so vivid you could smell the paper and coffee. ☕📖
The decline in independent bookstores absolutely broke my heart 💔 (5,591 bookstores in 2021 vs. 13,499 in 1993 😭) but the love Friss shows for these sanctuaries shines SO BRIGHT. ✨
✅ What Worked:
- Luscious storytelling ✍️
- Brilliant research 🕵️♂️ without info-dumping
- Anecdotes that kept it light and unputdownable 🫶
- Pure nostalgia and emotional resonance for book lovers 📚💕
❌ What Didn’t Work:
- Honestly??? NOTHING.
(Unless you count me wishing it had an extra 300 pages 😂 I could live in this book.)
📊 Rating Table:
| Category | Rating |
|---|---|
| ✍️ Writing | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| 🌍 Setting/World-Building | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| 🧑🤝🧑 Historical Figures / Characters | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| 🏛️ Research & Accuracy | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| ⭐ Overall | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
🌟 Final Thoughts:
The Bookshop is a rich, affectionate love song to bookstores—both the ones we know and the hundreds we can only dream of visiting. 🎶✨
If you’re the kind of person who thinks heaven probably smells like old books and fresh coffee ☕📖, this needs to be your next read.
Every day, I feel incredibly grateful that I live in Boston 🏙️❤️—a city that not only breathes history but also fiercely cherishes its indie bookstores.
In fact, reading this made me even more determined to finally walk the Freedom Trail 🚶♀️🗺️! The Old Corner Bookstore, which played such a huge part in American literary history, is a stop along the way! 🏛️📚
It’s like this book planted a little adventure seed in my mind—and now I can’t wait to explore my city’s bookish past even deeper. 📜✨
P.S. Evan Friss… can we PLEASE get a sequel covering bookstore history in other parts of the world too? 🇮🇳🙏 Because I would devour a history of Indian bookshops! 📚❤️
📚✨ Bookstores by Authors I Took Note of and will definitely try to visit:
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti – City Lights Bookstore, San Francisco 🌉📚
- Larry McMurtry – Booked Up, Archer City, Texas 🤠📖 (Permanently closed now)
- Jonathan Lethem – Red Gap Used Books, Blue Hill, Maine 🌲📚
- Louise Erdrich – Birchbark Books and Native Arts, Minneapolis, Minnesota 🌿✨
- Garrison Keillor – Common Good Books, St. Paul, Minnesota 📚🌟 (I think it’s sold?)
- Jeff Kinney – An Unlikely Story, Plainville, Massachusetts 🏡📖 (DIARY OF A WIMPY KID AUTHOR HAS A BOOKSTORE IN MA? WHY HAVE I NOT VISITED?)
- Judy Blume – Books & Books, Key West, Florida 🏝️📚
- Emma Straub – Books Are Magic, Brooklyn, New York ✨📚 (IK what I am doing when I visit NY next)
- Lin-Manuel Miranda – Drama Book Shop, New York City 🎭📖
✨ TL;DR:
Run, don’t walk, to grab The Bookshop if you love:
🏡 Cozy bookstores
📜 History that reads like a story
📖 Bibliophile dreams coming to life
5/5 ⭐ A soul-soothing masterpiece. ✨
Anushka's Bookish Shenanigans 