Matthew Chambers, Author of London and the Modernist Bookshop (CUP 2020), will be discussing his work on the role of literary communities and networks in the growth of the bookshop. The event will be recorded. A “bookseller” could once describe a retailer, publisher, printer, or even binder, and while these roles were more definitively disambiguated […]
The Bookseller Oral History Project, initiated by Lanora Jennings in 2023, aims to preserve the voices and experiences of booksellers, highlighting their roles in supporting societal movements and balancing commercial and social profits. The project underscores the historical significance of bookstores as community hubs and platforms for resistance and progressive discourse.
Evan Friss's The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore is "an affectionate and engaging history of the American bookstore and its central place in American cultural life, from department stores to indies, from highbrow dealers trading in first editions to sidewalk vendors, and from chains to special-interest community destinations." Matthew Chambers, author of London […]
In 1982, in the midst of Thatcherite-Britain, Jane Cholmeley, Sue Butterworth and Jane Anger decided they needed to open a feminist bookshop in London. The result was the Silver Moon Bookshop. For seventeen years, the Silver Moon survived commercially, selling books by women or about feminist concerns, and was able to serve as a safe […]
Radical Bookselling History Project: Dave Cope, John Goodman, Rick Seccombe, Maggie Walker From the early 1970s, there was a rapid expansion in the number of radical bookshops in the UK, with at least one in many large (and some small) towns and cities. The number peaked in the 1980s and then declined: few have survived, […]
We are looking forward to our second pre-holidays Bring Your Own Book event.
Bring a favourite book (or two) that you’ve read (or want to read) featuring bookstores (fiction, non-fiction, all welcome!). This will be a relaxed and informal chat—perfect for getting into the holiday spirit with fellow book lovers!
Hidden Behind the Bookshelves Join Prof Samantha Rayner to discuss her recently published Cambridge Element, Women Booksellers in the Twentieth Century. The British women booksellers who built and ran successful businesses before, during, and after the Second World War have largely been forgotten. Samantha Rayner (UCL) will be speaking about her research for Women Booksellers of […]
Mark Thornton, Senior Partnerships Manager for the UK side of Bookshop.org will be talking to us about the way this online platform is trying to support physical indie bookshops, and some of the connected bookish initiatives the B-Corp company has initiated.
Convenience and the saving of time are attractions of buying books online, particularly on Amazon, which advertises rapid delivery speeds at very low prices. Algorithms are designed to save time, making a database of books easily searchable, but they are also programmed to increase the time users spend looking at a particular page or scrolling […]
Bookselling seems to be an innate profession, after all we learn to read at school and to be a bookseller you have to love reading, don't you?
Across Europe, a number of bookselling schools, whether public or private, apprenticeship or university-based, for initial or continuing training, provide high-quality training for future booksellers, department managers or company directors.
What do they teach and how do they train the booksellers of tomorrow?
Shelf Life is a meticulously crafted exploration of bookselling and publishing that spans two millennia. This engaging narrative unveils the resilience and innovation of key figures who have shaped the literary landscape, from the pioneering days of William Caxton to the contemporary influence of Jeff Bezos.
his paper presents exploratory notes from my ongoing research project, which focuses on occult and New Age spirituality bookshops in Britain and aims to illuminate their function as hubs and arenas for the transference of knowledge and information within these respective milieus, c. 1893 - c.1993.
