Bookselling Research Network

Literature for the People: How the Pioneering Macmillan Brothers built a Publishing Powerhouse
2026-03-13 14:00 - 15:00 (Europe/London)
Join us with this link: https://ucl.zoom.us/j/91934261983?pwd=[REDACTED]

From poverty on the Isle of Arran, via a little shop in Cambridge, two men with little education founded one of the world’s most famous publishing companies, bringing to their Victorian readers, authors as varied as Lewis Carroll, Christina Rossetti, Matthew Arnold, Thomas Hughes and Alfred Lord Tennyson. They combined fabulous networking skills with a keen business sense and a love of fine writing. Above all, the brothers, Christian Socialists, believed that publishing should have moral and political purpose.Within two generations the family would produce a British Prime Minister – quite the ‘rags to riches’ tale.

Sarah Harkness studied PPE at Mansfield College, Oxford, then joined an investment bank in the City, one of the first women working in corporate finance, where she enjoyed a highly successful career for twenty years. For the last twenty years she has served on a number of boards, including both public and private companies. Her interests have been primarily in the education, culture and health sectors, including three years as Pro-Chancellor of the University of Sheffield. She is now chair of Orthopaedic Research UK. She holds an Honorary Doctorate from Sheffield University and an Honorary Fellowship at Mansfield College. In 2018, a ten-year personal interest in a pioneering Victorian artist and writer, Nelly Erichsen, led to her writing and self-publishing a well-received biography, which was longlisted for the 2019 William MB Berger Prize for British Art History. In October 2021 she was awarded an MA with Distinction in Biography at the University of Buckingham, studying under Professor Jane Ridley. In 2021 she won the Tony Lothian Prize, awarded by The Biographers’ Club, for the best proposal for an uncommissioned biography. Literature for the People: How the Pioneering Macmillan Brothers Built a Publishing Powerhouse was published by Pan Macmillan in May 2024.

Insights from the Booksellers Association research into the Cultural and Community Value of Bookshops across the UK and Ireland
2026-03-03 14:30 - 15:30
It has long been the contention of the Booksellers Association (UK and Ireland) that its members – chains and indies – play an outsize role in enriching the cultural lives of their communities. Starting in 2024, research has been undertaken to determine the extent to which and in what ways bookshops enrich their communities, whilst identifying enablers and barriers so that this contribution can be sustained and strengthened. Consequently, a series of research reports has been produced covering England (September 2024), Ireland (excl. Northern Ireland: November 2024), Scotland (November 2025), and Wales (scheduled for January 2026). Howard will outline the insights arising from this body of research, similarities and contrasts between the four nations, and the key policy recommendations that have emerged.

Howard Davies has a background in Public Affairs and Public Policy. Howard is a self-confessed bookshop enthusiast. He has previously worked for the Booksellers Association of UK and Ireland as (maternity cover) Head of Policy and Public Affairs. Howard authored the 2024 research reports on the Cultural Role and Value of England’s Independent Bookshops (funded by Arts Council England and supported by the BA), and on the Cultural Role and Value of Bookshops in Ireland (funded by the BA), and the November 2025 BA research report into the Cultural and Community role of Scotland’s Bookshops, and the January 2026 research report into the Cultural and Community role of Wales’s Bookshops.

Sheila Markham & Conversations with the Rare Book Trade
2026-01-27 14:00 - 15:00
Sheila Markham is an Honorary Member of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association for her oral history project celebrating rare booksellers and collectors from around the world.

After reading Theology at Oxford, Sheila joined Marlborough Rare Books in 1979, where she spent seven years doing a traditional apprenticeship. She worked for various leading figures in the rare book business, and ran her own business specialising in books on the Ancient Near East for a few years. In 1994 she became Librarian of the Travellers Club in London, a position which she continues to hold.

In 1991 Sheila was invited by the editor of The Bookdealer to conduct a series of interviews with her colleagues in the world of rare books. The project continues to this day, although they now appear in The Book Collector, and the total number of interviews published so far is 172. Two collections of interviews were published in book-form in 2004 and 2014, and A Third Book of Booksellers: Conversations with the Antiquarian Book Trade will be published on 1 December 2025.

In her talk, Sheila will share some of her findings from these conversations, covering a period from the early 1990s, when bookselling had hardly changed since the invention of printing, to the turbulent times of online commerce.

The majority of those interviewed come from the English-speaking world, but booksellers in Argentina, France, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, South Korea, Spain and Turkey are also represented. One of the recurring themes in these global conversations is the unanimous belief in the survival and enduring appeal of the book as a physical object.

BYOB25: Books and spaces
2025-12-12 14:00 - 15:00
Our final session of the year will be on Friday, 12th December, again at 2 pm on Teams — this will be our now traditional festive session, where you are invited to bring along a book you’ve enjoyed this year to talk about. This year’s twist, to fit in with the theme of next year’s conference: be prepared to also talk about the space you obtained your book from, and the space(s) where you read it! Any book genre, any book format welcome!

Link to Join: BRN session | Meeting-Join | Microsoft Teams

David Piovesan & The European Bookshop Business Model
2025-11-21 14:00 - 15:00
Join researcher and author David Piovesan as he shares insights from his four-year journey across 23 countries, where he met over 250 booksellers and publishing professionals. Drawing from his newly published book The European Bookshop Business Model (Routledge, October 2025), Piovesan offers a compelling overview of how bookshops are navigating the challenges of the digital age. Discover the strategies, struggles, and innovations shaping the future of bookselling in Europe.

David Piovesan is an Associate Professor in Management Sciences at Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3, France, and a former CEO of a French independent bookshop. He is leading a research program on book markets from a European-based perspective. He has been a visiting researcher in several universities (Prague, Padua, Münster). He is regularly invited to speak at book fairs and professional meetings all over Europe. He is currently researching the role of books in facing ecological issues.

The European Bookshop Business Model

From Margin to Market: The Growth of Queer Literature in the UK
2025-10-31 14:00 - 15:00
Join the webinar now

Over the past five years, the UK has seen a striking surge in LGBTQIA+ literature, both in visibility and in commercial weight. The “Queer Top 50” alone accounted for around 2.2 million books sold and £20.6 million in value last year 2024, showing that queer writing is no longer a niche but a significant cultural and economic force.

Breakout titles such as Heartstopper have set records—60,000 copies sold in just three days—proving that readers are hungry for authentic queer stories across genres. This growth is also supported by change inside the industry itself: in 2024, 16% of the UK publishing workforce identified as LGBT+, up from just 5% in 2017, helping shift commissioning and marketing decisions towards greater inclusivity.

For independent and specialist booksellers, this represents both opportunity and responsibility. We are uniquely positioned to curate, champion, and hand-sell the diverse range of LGBTQIA+ titles that mainstream outlets may overlook. At a time when some schools and libraries are under pressure to remove queer books, shops like Gay on Wyebecome not just retailers but safe cultural spaces, sustaining visibility, access, and community for readers who need these stories most.

Join Tom Owen as he discusses the research that led to the opening of Gay on Wye and shares his vision for the future of queer literature on the UK high street. Stocking LGBTQIA+ books isn’t about cashing in on the pink pound — it’s about offering stories that resonate deeply with readers and help build lasting community.

About Tom Owen

Tom Owen is the founder of Gay on Wye, an independent LGBTQIA+ bookshop in Hay[1]on-Wye, the world-famous “town of books.” Opened in 2023 after nearly a decade of planning, the shop is Tom’s vision for a space where queer literature is not just included but celebrated. He curates a diverse selection of books that reflect the struggles, triumphs, and experiences of the LGBTQIA+ community.

With a background in creative arts, Tom has worked with institutions across South Wales and the UK, shaping his understanding of storytelling, culture, and representation. A passionate reader—especially of science fiction—he believes in literature’s power to transport, challenge, and affirm identities.

As an advocate for independent bookshops, Tom champions their role in amplifying underrepresented voices, offering alternatives to mainstream retail’s sales-driven approach. Through Gay on Wye, he isn’t just selling books—he’s fostering community, conversations, and visibility for queer stories.

Whether promoting LGBTQIA+ authors, creating a welcoming space for discovery, or simply sharing his love of books, Tom remains committed to the belief that every reader deserves to see themselves reflected in literature.

BRN Conference 2025: Bookselling as Resistance
2025-09-11 08:00 - 2025-09-12 17:00
Conference in Münster, Germany, combined with the annual meeting of the Bookselling Research Network (BRN).

We are still accepting abstracts for the Bookselling as Resistance conference to be held at the University of Münster. The deadline for submission has been extended to September 29, 2024.

We’ve had some questions about the early deadline; as indicated below, we are applying for funding and need an indication of participation to complete the application. We anticipate that there will be another call later, but we are grateful to delegates who are able to submit something for consideration now.

Call for Papers

Abstracts are requested by September 15, 2024 (see below for how to submit)

Book historical work has been increasingly highlighting books – their publication, distribution and reception – in intersectional activist contexts, shining light on interconnections between community-building, politics and the book. In our conference, scheduled for September 2025 in Münster, Germany, we plan to hone in on bookselling as a practice and consider the ways in which resistance can be interpreted vis-à-vis bookselling and bookstores.

As Kimberley Kinder has shown, bookstores – and booksellers – play a central role in social activism and for “activist placemaking” (Kinder 2021). In the wake of the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States in 2016, independent bookstores received heightened media attention for offering readers and community members spaces to exchange ideas and organize, with the stores “taking on roles ranging from meeting place to political war room” (Bosman 2017). Adjacently, feminist bookstores experienced a resurgence after the 2016 US election (Kirch 2018). Doyle Highland has considered “how the material space of bookstores shapes social engagement […] and cultural values” (2023), and recent work by Dhingra (2024) and Srinivasan (forthcoming, 2025) puts pressure on these concepts from an Indian perspective. Internationally, independent bookselling per se has come to be understood as a mode of resistance against Amazon’s market dominance and destructive human and ecological (Caine 2021).

Beyond these examples, our conference invites delegates to explore the theme of bookselling – past and present – as resistance. We encourage papers that take transcultural, transnational and intersectional approaches. 20-minute papers could engage with issues such as:

Informal spaces of bookselling and alternative routes of circulation

Bookstores as community/gathering space

Mail-order book clubs or book subscription boxes

Books on the bookshelf and activist organizational practice; curation; banned book displays

Alternative bookstore business models (independent, volunteer-run, traveling, etc.)

Serving specific communities: bookselling for specific groups, communities, lifestyles; locations of bookselling

Bookselling of pirated copies and resistance to copyright/market norms

Booksellers, censorship, and legal battles

This is not an exhaustive list, and we welcome proposals for papers that engage the theme in creative ways.

We plan to apply for funding through the German Research Foundation, which would enable us to pay for delegates’ travel to Münster and accommodation during the conference. For this reason, abstracts are requested by September 15, 2024. Notification of preliminary acceptance and inclusion in the funding bid will be made by September 30, 2024. Please submit 400-word abstracts and short bios via the Indico platform: https://indico.uni-muenster.de/e/brn_2025.

Works Cited and Bibliography

Bosman, Julie. “Bookstores Stoke Trump Resistance With Action, Not Just Words.” The New York Times, February 15, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/15/us/bookstores-stoke-trump-resistance-with-action-not-just-words.html.

Caine, Danny. How to Protect Bookstores and Why: The Present and Future of Bookselling. Portland: Microcosm Publishing, 2023.

Caine, Danny. How to Resist Amazon & Why: The Fight for Local Economies, Data Privacy, Fair Labor, Independent Bookstores, and a People-Powered Future. Portland: Microcosm Publishing, 2021.

Farrell, Greg.On the Books: A Graphic Tale of Working Woes at NYC’s Strand Bookstore. Portland: Microcosm Publishing, 2014.

Garber, Jeremy. “Bookselling in the 21st Century: There Will Always Be Bookstores.” Literary Hub, November 9, 2016. https://lithub.com/bookselling-in-the-21st-century-there-will-always-be-bookstores/.

Hogan, Kristen. The Feminist Bookstore Movement: Lesbian Antiracism and Feminist Accountability. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.

Kinder, Kimberley. The Radical Bookstore: Counterspace for Social Movements. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021.

Kirch, Claire. “Trump Presidency Reinvigorates Feminist Bookstores.” Publishers Weekly, March 09, 2018. Accessed July 24, 2024. https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/bookselling/article/76289-trump-presidency-reinvigorates-feminist-bookstores.html.

Noorda, Rachel, Corinna Norrick-Rühl, and Elizabeth Le Roux. “Exploring Transnational Dimensions of Activism in Contemporary Book Culture: Introduction.” Mémoires Du Livre 13, no. 2 (June 14, 2023): 1–12. https://doi.org/10.7202/1100559ar.

Thomas, June. A Place of Our Own: Six Spaces That Shaped Queer Women’s Culture. London: Virago, 2024.

Shai Feraro: Occult and New Age Spirituality Bookshops
2025-06-20 14:00 - 15:30
Studying Occult and New Age Spirituality Bookshops as Sites for the Production and Exchange of Rejected Knowledge in the UK, c. 1893 – c. 1993 Dr. Shai Feraro (University of Haifa)

This 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. Its time frame is dictated by the founding of Watkins Books – one of the first establishments in London to dedicate itself specifically to occult and esoteric literature – and by the rise of the Internet, which has become the chief arena for the exchange of relevant knowledge, thus eliminating the primacy and – in the case of the occult subcultures – sometimes even the very exclusivity of the bookshop.

I aim to show how these literary establishments were simultaneously dependent on and cultivated a large array of networks concerned with ‘rejected knowledge’. Following Webb (1976) and especially Hanegraaff (2012) we can define ‘rejected knowledge’ as a generative culture of epistemic claims, based on a fusion of heterodox religion and speculative science, which has been practiced against hegemonic religious and scientific institutions since at least the late Nineteenth Century.

This project is vital for understanding the proliferation of new and alternative religions in western societies and opens a new line of wider historiographical enquiry with the UK as a test case, answering longstanding questions regarding the material availability of ‘occult’ and ‘new age’ reading materials during the Twentieth Century and their impact on wider British – and Western – society.

My research focuses on the study of occult and New Age Spirituality bookshops in Britain between the late-19th and late-20th Centuries. I’m also interested in esoteric publishing and in the role of women in the British book trade during the same period. More broadly, I research alternative religions and spiritualities in North America and the UK during the 19th and 20th centuries. My 2020 book, Women and Gender Issues in British Paganism, 1945–1990, was published by Palgrave Macmillan, who also published two anthologies I co-edited – Contemporary Alternative Spiritualities in Israel (2016) and Magic and Witchery in the Modern West (2019).

Michael Robb–author of Shelf Life
2025-05-23 14:00 - 15:00
Shelf Life: A Journey Through the Past, Present & Future of Bookselling and Publishing in Britain

Time: May 23, 2025 02:00 PM London

The Author

Michael Robb has experienced first-hand the shifting tides of this well-loved industry over the past 40 years.

From successfully running an independent bookshop in Essex for two decades, to transitioning into the publishing domain, his broad network within the book trade gives him a unique insight into the world of the books.

Exactly the book I wish I had had in my hands when I was writing mine! It’s a simply written and straightforward account of the history of bookselling in Britain, and the development of British publishing, brought to life by the author’s obvious passion for the subject, his warm love of books and his appreciation of the value of reading for the human soul. Full of ideas for the future, and a wake-up call to all of us who worry about the future of our children, when public and school libraries are disappearing before our eyes and screens are ubiquitous. I also enjoyed the discussion of the impact of AI on the industry, which is clearly of concern if we value genuine creativity. Packed full of interesting facts, and interviews and insights from some of the leading players in the industry. – Sarah Harkness, author of Literature for the People: How the Pioneering Macmillan Brothers Built a Publishing Powerhouse

In Shelf Life, Michael Robb gives us 2,000 years of the history of publishing books, shot through with Robb’s own love of reading, before navigating the tempestuous present. We can’t know for sure the next chapter in the history of the book, but Michael Robb’s surging account – from William Caxton to the contemporary high street; from Wynkyn de Worde to the Net Book Agreement – can help us speculate better on the book’s possible futures. I loved reading Shelf Life. – Adam Smyth, Professor of English Literature and the History of the Book at Balliol College, Oxford, and author of The Book-Makers: A History of the Book in 18 Remarkable Lives (2024)

Nina Stavisky on European Bookselling Courses
2025-04-25 14:00 - 15:30
Time: Apr 25, 2025 02:00 PM London

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?

Nina Stavisky has been working in the book trade for over 20 years, as a bookseller, trainer, teacher, in the technical field and in booksellers’ associations. She is the general delegate of ALIRE, an association working on technique and technology in bookshops, and is also an associate lecturer at the University of Paris Nanterre and head of the bookselling section of the information and communication department, which trains students in three years to become booksellers.

ALIRE was founded in 1989, and represents independent booksellers, chains and pure-players (including Amazon, supermarkets…) in the French book trade.

Anna Muenchrath: Just Browsing: Time and the Online Bookstore
2025-03-28 14:00 - 15:30
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 through a list of results. Moreover, when we move from the web to the distribution warehouse, Amazon’s algorithms parcel out time to “pickers” who have to try to beat the clock (“make rate”) as they translate online clicks, communicated at the speed of light, into the work of navigating vast shelves in search of books and other items. Set against the backdrop of the pastoral metaphor of “browsing,” indicating a slow consumer behaviour historically linked to book buying, this talk considers the ubiquitous control of time in Amazon’s bookselling operation.

Mark Thornton from Bookshop.org
2025-02-14 14:00 - 15:30
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.

Women Booksellers in the Twentieth Century
2025-01-24 14:00 - 15:30
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 the Twentieth Century: Hidden Behind the Bookshelves, (CUP, 2025) which seeks to reclaim some of these histories from where they lie hidden or obscured in archives, accounts of the book trade of the time, and other sources. Though they were often called ‘formidable’, this research reveals the astonishing impact of these women at local, national, and international levels.

Women Booksellers of the Twentieth Century: Hidden Behind the Bookshelves is out on January 17th, and can be downloaded for free here: Women Booksellers in the Twentieth Century.

BYOB: Bookshop Books
2024-12-13 14:00 - 15:30
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!

Books Recommended and Discussed at BRN session on December 13th

Non-Fiction

· Jane Cholmeley, A Bookshop of Their Own (2024)

· Joseph Hone, The Book Forger (2024)

· Frederick Nesta, George Gissing, Grub Street, and the Transformation of British Publishing (2020)

· Frederick Nesta, ed., Where the Victorians Got Their Reading: Cultural change in marketing, distribution, and individual access for ‘The Million’ in Britain, North America, and Australia (2024)

· Michael Robb, Shelf Life (forthcoming)

· Arthur Edward Waite, The Quest for Bloods: A Study of the Victorian Penny Dreadful (1997)

Fiction:

· Jenny Colgan, Midnight at the Christmas Bookshop (2024)

· Carsten Henn, The Door-to-Door Bookstore (2024)

· Veronica Henry, How to Find Love in a Bookshop (2024)

· Ian Norrie, Brought To Book (2003)

· Cressida McLaughlin, The Secret Christmas Bookshop (2024)

· Leonardo Padura, Havana Fever (2009)

· Barbara Wilson, Murder in the Collective (1994)

Radical Bookselling in the UK 1970-2000
2024-11-22 14:00 - 15:30
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, although some new ones have been established more recently.

The four of us who set up and run the Radical Bookselling History Project were all involved in that wave of radical bookselling and decided it was a history that needed to be recorded and told.

We contend that these shops significantly contributed to the growth of radical social and political movements in this period. Not only did they provide a crucial last link in the production, distribution and consumption of radical literature and other artefacts in their multitude of forms – books, pamphlets, newspapers, magazines, posters, badges, records and even board games – but in pre-internet times they were also social spaces where activists met and held both public and private events.

The group held a conference in Manchester in October 2019 with 37 attendees who had worked in radical bookshops or distributors. Since then, it has produced eight bi-annual Newsletters (PDF only) covering the earliest and most recent radical bookshops and extending even to radical publishing and distribution. Apart from our Newsletter, which we think is world-first, articles from our work have also appeared in other journals.

In addition to this writing and publishing, we are building an oral history archive by interviewing other shop workers and encouraging them to write histories of their shops. We are also attempting the difficult task of tracking down surviving records of the shops and ensuring they are preserved in publicly accessible archives.

We have participated in public events such as the 2023 London Radical Book Fair and the Quiet Revolutions event at London’s Barbican Centre in 2022.

Much of our work is in collaboration with other organisations, including On the Record, The Alliance of Radical Booksellers, The Working Class Movement Library and London’s Senate House Library (over the digitisation of the Radical Bookseller) and we look forward to a fruitful link with the Bookselling Research Network.

The Conference Report and Newsletters are available at: https://www.leftontheshelfbooks.co.uk/research.php

In Conversation with Jane Cholmeley
2024-10-25 14:00 - 15:30
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 space for women to participate in literary events and as a resource center to learn about local feminist initiatives.

In A Bookshop of One’s Own, Jane Cholmeley describes what it was like to start a feminist bookshop in an industry dominated by men. With humor and honesty, Jane tells the story of how a lesbian bookshop could thrive in Thatcher’s time when the government was legislating to restrict women’s rights, and the lessons learned when trying to run a business when your real aim is to change the world.

Conversation with Evan Friss, Author of The Bookshop
2024-09-27 14:00 - 15:30
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 and the Modernist Bookshop interviews Evan Friss, followed by a Q&A with BRN members.

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.

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.

Lanora Jennings on The Bookseller Oral History Project
2024-07-12 14:00 - 15:30
Lanora Jennings began this project in 2023 after a conversation at an academic conference with other researchers in the History of the Book field. Many noted how difficult it was to find primary sources from booksellers—retail operations rarely donate their papers to library archives. As a former bookseller, Lanora thought that the best way to preserve the history of bookselling was through the voices of the booksellers themselves.

Bookstores are private entities performing a public service – a delicate balance maintained for over 150 years. Bookstores are places where literary and cultural endeavors entwine with commerce, where the pursuit of economic profits must balance with the pursuit of social profit – because a bookstore is symbiotic with its community. This is the culture of bookselling.

Historically, booksellers have used their spaces as sites of resistance against censorship and in support of the First Amendment. Bookstores have served as crucial networking hubs for challenging systemic societal issues—from Women’s Suffrage to the Civil Rights Movement to LGBT+ Equal Rights. These stores constructed safe spaces that brought people together, stimulated progressive conversation, and facilitated public protest.

The Bookseller Oral History Project collects the historical experiences, insights, and perspectives of current and former booksellers. These interviews help preserve the culture of bookselling, the work practices, the decision-making processes, historical actions, and events, and they preserve the institutional memory of bookselling in general.

Booksellers rarely tell their own stories and their impact on their communities is often anonymous. This project aims to preserve their legacy.

Lanora Jennings began her career in the early 90s at Borders Book & Music. She has since worked for three prominent independent bookstores and owned her own store for a time. She is currently the field sales representative for Princeton University Press and Yale University Press. She is also an independent researcher working on a large project that chronicles the history of bookselling in America, of which the Oral History Project is one part.

Publishing Your Friends: Interwar Booksellers and Their Literary Networks
2024-05-24 14:00 - 15:30
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 in the nineteenth century, and certainly by the early twentieth century, it remained common for a bookseller to publish periodicals, books, and especially sales catalogues of their stock. First, I examine situations where booksellers published periodicals of modernist literature, and approach them as book trade narratives, doubling as elaborate advertisements for their businesses, including the promotion of specific stock or lending library; e.g., Coterie (Henderson’s, London), Poetry and Drama/The Chapbook (The Poetry Bookshop), and This Quarter (At the Sign of the Black Manikin, Paris). Second, I contextualize the famous examples of Sylvia Beach publishing James Joyce’s Ulysses and Edward Titus publishing Lady Chatterley’s Lover within these same dynamics of promotion and reputation-building. Finally, I explore additional examples of bookseller-publishers — Argus Books (Chicago), House of Books (New York), Stanley Rose (Los Angeles), and The Poetry Bookshop (London) — to consider how associated literary communities could be bound and sold, selling the idea of the bookshop to a broader clientele.

Matthew Chambers is a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Reading. He has written on literary networks and publishing history in Modernism, Periodicals, and Cultural Poetics (Palgrave 2015) and in London and the Modernist Bookshop (Cambridge 2020). He is a member of the Bookselling Research Network, and editor of the peer-reviewed journal The New Americanist (Edinburgh University Press).

Conversation with Mark Pearson of Libro.fm
2024-03-15 14:00 - 15:30
Mark Pearson is the CEO and co-founder of Libro.fm, the digital audiobook platform for more than 2,600 independent bookshops around the world. Before that he was the publisher at Pear Press. You can learn more about Libro.fm at https://libro.fm/story and through our annual social purpose reports https://libro.fm/reports.

Bookselling in India: The 'Proper' and the 'Parallel'
2024-01-26 14:00 - 15:30
The presenters retain copyright for all images in the presentation except those listed below. Images may be re-used with permission of the copyright holders, either Pritha Mukherjee or Kanupriya Dhingra.

Slide 2:

Photograph of the book launch of India Book Market Report, 2022. Image of Nielsen Bookscan India Book Market Report 2022 from “New report on the Indian book market” by IPA Editor, International Publishers Association, 4 Oct 2022, online. https://internationalpublishers.org/new-report-on-the-indian-book-market/

Slides 3 and 4:

No. of publishers and Data about sales generated revenue from 2019-2022. “Total number of publishers for selected countries, 2022” by Nielsen Bookdata, November 2023, in The Global Publishing Industry in 2022, WIPO, 2023. CC BY 4.0, p. 26.

“Total copies sold and sales revenue, 2019-2022,” by Nielsen Bookscan, November 2023, in “Nielsen Bookscan data,” The Global Publishing Industry in 2022, WIPO, 2023. CC BY 4.0, p. 20.

Slide 6:

Seagull Books photos. Seagull Books, Kolkata, from their website https://www.seagullbooks.org/the-seagull-books-store/

Book collection in Seagull books, Kolkata, from Seagull Books Instagram page. https://www.instagram.com/theindiastory/p/C19vTs3y8ZG/

Slide 7:

The book launch of Smoke and Ashes by Amitav Ghosh (Harper Collins, 2023) at Taj Bengal, Kolkata https://www.instagram.com/p/CvWouqMrnDF/

Slide 10:

Presidency University, formerly known as Presidency College in Kolkata, by Pinakpani/CC BY SA 4.0/wikimedia.org https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Presidency_University,_formerly_known_as_Presidency_College_in_Kolkata_18.jpg

Slide 12:

Photograph of Dasgupta and Company https://www.getbengal.com/details/das-gupta-and-company-the-oldest-book-shop-opens-a-free-library-getbengal-exclusive-interview

Slide 15:

Photo of Abu Sorip Mullick, or PT Kaku from “Booksellers of College Street: Between tiny shops and greasy palms, an untold story” by Ishita Sengupta, Indian Express, Kolkata, 21 Dec 2018. Photo by Subham Dutta https://indianexpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/college-street_759.jpg

Conversation with Re-Imagining Bookstores
2023-11-17 08:00 - 17:00
Join us for a session talking to Praveen Madan, Peggy Holman, and Amanda Hall about the Re-Imagining Bookstores movement, and hear how it is advocating for bookstore support in the US.

The PowerPoint presentation from the event can be viewed here: Reimagining Bookstores.

Imagine bookstores with new ways to engage their communities, easy access to funding and new business models. Now imagine these bookstores having strategies to increase readership, attract and retain high-caliber staff, and provide meaningful careers paying meaningful wages. Through these bookstores our communities deepen literacy, increase civic engagement, and become stronger.

If you can imagine this scenario, then it is time to embrace bookstores as a social cause. It is time to invest in bookstores so they have the means to strengthen and reinvent themselves. We seek to launch a movement to encourage a new wave of investments in bookstores similar to the investments that have historically been made in public libraries, museums, public radio and television, and non-profit journalism and literacy organizations. [Re-Imagining Bookstores]

Praveen Madan is obsessed with a strong and exciting future for bookstores. He has successfully led Kepler’s from the brink of closure to becoming one of the most innovative and thriving bookstores in the country. He has been informally advising bookstores and their community champions on new sustainable models.

Amanda Hall is an Emeritus Advisor of Kepler’s Books & Magazines in Menlo Park, CA. A former small-business owner from Chicago, she has channeled her retail knowledge and passion for books into Kepler’s new mission-based model that supports community engagement, sustainability and staff welfare. She has a BS in Journalism from Northwestern University and a Master’s in Social Work from the University of Illinois.

Peggy Holman supports diverse groups in facing complex issues by turning presentation into conversation and passivity into participation. In The Change Handbook, Holman & her co-authors profile 61 practices that engage people in creating their desired future. Her award-winning book Engaging Emergence: Turning Upheaval into Opportunity provides a roadmap for tackling complex challenges through stories, principles, and practices.

The Art of Libromancy: On Selling Books and Reading Books in the Twenty-first Century
2023-10-27 14:00 - 15:30
Join us for a conversation with Josh Cook as he discusses his new book, The Art of Libromancy: On Selling Books and Reading Books in the Twenty-first Century.

Josh Cook is a bookseller and co-owner at Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he has worked since 2004. He is also the author of the critically acclaimed postmodern detective novel An Exaggerated Murder and his fiction, criticism, and poetry have appeared in numerous leading literary publications. He grew up in Lewiston, Maine, and lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.

Booksellers and Bookstores in Mainland China: the Age of Common Prosperity
2023-05-26 14:00 - 15:30
This talk considers the place and importance of books in Chinese society and in the cultural life of the people. Our research gives new insights into the relationship between books and what has become known as common prosperity in mainland China. This, in turn, feeds into wider societal concerns as it raises questions about the place and purpose of bookstores within the broader social culture. The growth and development of the Chinese book trade will be covered but whereas other studies base their findings on data taken from sales and finance our focus is on official government publications to give a fresh perspective on the apparent expansion and development of physical bookstores in mainland China. How does an examination of the government policy regarding booksellers, as set out in the Five-Year Plans and the Laws of the People’s Republic of China, help us to understand the importance of literacy and culture in the wider Chinese society?

Simon Mahony is Professor of Digital Humanities, Beijing Normal University at Zhuhai, Emeritus Professor at the Department of Information Studies, University College London, and Visiting Professor at the Department of Information Management, Peking University. His research focus is digital humanities with specific interests in education, information studies, equality, diversity, inclusion, and the open agenda.

The Spaces of Bookselling with Kristen Highland
2023-03-31 14:00 - 15:30
Claiming Space: Sidewalk Bookselling and Belonging in New York City

This talk explores sidewalk bookselling in New York City as a dynamic space and practice for redrawing cultural, social, and legal boundaries of belonging for the bookseller and their customer-readers. Sidewalk booksellers everywhere must erect their tables on the unstable and shifting space of the sidewalk as regulated and politicized public and social space. In New York City in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, while sidewalk booksellers benefited from First Amendment exemptions for vending print material, municipal space management strategies continued to circumscribe and contain street bookselling. Within this tension, New York City’s sidewalk booksellers crafted geographies of belonging through diverse strategies of evading regulatory enforcement and cultivating intellectual and social exchange. Using the liminal and contested space of the sidewalk not only to make a living but also to create an inclusive space that incorporates the book and bookselling into the dynamics of urban social exchange, New York City’s sidewalk booksellers assert the value of books on streets.

Following Kristen’s talk, she will be interviewed by Eben Muse about her recent CUP Element, The Spaces of Bookselling, followed by an open Q&A session with all attendees.

Kristen Highland is Assistant Professor of English at American University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. Her research focuses on book history and the material dimensions of literary culture, including the social and cultural life of American bookstores, as well as digital humanities and mapping. She has recently published The Spaces of Bookselling: Stores, Streets, and Pages with the Cambridge University Press Elements in Publishing and Book Culture series.

Feminist & Queer Bookshops – Community and Censure
2023-02-24 14:00 - 15:30
Join Dr Kathy Liddle and Dr Sarah Pyke as they present their work on feminist and queer bookstores as places of contested cultural interactions.

Kathy Liddle

My presentation today will focus on two strands of my research on North American feminist bookstores. First, I will briefly discuss my published research on the role of feminist bookstores as what I term cultural interaction spaces. In this case, intentionally curated selections and carefully cultivated atmospheres open opportunities for their patrons to interact, observe, and experiment with cultural materials. For my respondents – primarily lesbians – the spaces contributed to their identity development and to the development of group solidarity. Second, I will briefly introduce a project underway to explore how feminist bookstore owners historically claimed a niche that drew in part on a capitalist market logic, while simultaneously critiquing capitalism and endeavouring to embed their activities in a feminist logic. I show how these owners managed to blend these competing and often contradictory demands in pursuit of both profit and social change.

Dr. Kathy Liddle is Associate Professor, in the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto Scarborough. She has developed and taught courses on introductory sociology, culture, media, qualitative methods, and the sociology of books, as well as a graduate seminar on teaching sociology. She incorporates critical pedagogies into her teaching, with a particular interest in supporting first-generation students and students from underrepresented communities. She is currently researching engagement and community-building in large enrollment courses. Her disciplinary research interests lie at the intersections of culture, organizations, gender, and sexuality. Her work on feminist bookstores considers their organizational logics, contexts of emergence and decline, and contributions to fostering feminist thought in general, and lesbian-feminist community in particular; this research has been published in Cultural Sociology and The Journal of Lesbian Studies.

Sarah Pyke

“Gay Books Will Burn” proclaimed a headline in London freesheet Capital Gay in June 1984, following the second of several raids by HM Customs and Excise on Gay’s the Word bookshop, Bloomsbury. These raids, known as ‘Operation Tiger’, saw thousands of pounds’ worth of stock seized, staff homes searched, and the shop’s directors and manager charged with importing indecent or obscene titles. They faced an Old Bailey trial, and possible imprisonment: the most high-profile obscenity case since that of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1960. Yet ‘Operation Tiger’ – and the sustained, and ultimately successful, campaign mounted to ‘Defend Gay’s the Word’ in the face of this heavy-handed state intervention – remains a largely underexamined episode in queer history. In this talk, I place ‘Operation Tiger’ in a longer history of literary censorship and queer book use, examining the relationship between the state, the (queer) reader, and the British bookselling and publishing industries.

Dr Sarah Pyke is an early career academic working on queer histories of the book. Currently MHRA Postdoctoral Research Associate at Anglia Ruskin University, Sarah has taught at the University of Roehampton and Anglia Ruskin University, and has held fellowships at Freie Universität, Berlin, and the Institute of English Studies, University of London. In 2023, Sarah co-convened (with Malcolm Noble) a symposium and practice-based workshop, Queer Bibliography: Tools, Methods, Practices, Approaches, and is teaching a London Rare Books School course on children’s books. She is the recipient of the SHARP 25th Anniversary Fellowship Award 2023, which will fund further research into ‘Operation Tiger’, the 1980s raids by HM Customs on Gay’s the Word bookshop in London. The Award will facilitate the creation of a new collection of oral histories of the raids and their aftermath.

Reading, Wanting and Broken Economics: with Dr Simon Frost
2022-05-25 14:00 - 15:30
An Interview with Dr Simon Frost

Dr Simon Frost, Principal Academic in English at Bournemouth University and author of Reading, Wanting, and Broken Economics: A Twenty-First-Century Study of Readers and Bookshops in Southampton around 1900 (SUNY Press, 2021) part of SUNY, speaks with Dr Eben Muse (the Stephen Colclough Centre for the History and Culture of the Book) about the cultural and economic place of bookstores, the shifting relationship between economics and literature, and books as material, commodified, and contested objects of economic exchange.

Combining historical study, theorization, and experimental fiction, this book takes commodity culture and book retail around 1900 as the prime example of a market of symbolic goods. With the port of Southampton, England, as his case study, Simon R. Frost reveals how the city’s bookshops, with their combinations of libraries, haberdashery, stationery, and books, sustained and were sustained by the dreams of ordinary readers, and how together they created the values powering this market. The goods in this market were symbolic and were not “consumed” but read. Their readings were created between other readers and texts, in happy disobedience to the neoliberal laws of the free market. Today such reader-created social markets comprise much of the world’s branded economies, which is why Frost calls for a new understanding of both literary and market values.

Developing Collaterals: Book Retail Networks in the Creation of Social Prosperity
2022-05-25 14:00 - 15:00
This round table will discuss the financial business dimension of a bookstore in tandem with its social dimension as the site for networked communities. While the bookstore’s assets may generate revenue, they have other outputs from other ‘collaterals’, such as their communities of readers and end users, with the possibility that both might contribute to a much wider shared prosperity. In short, the panel participants will ask from their varied standpoints, whether there are good reasons to think of the otherwise separate domains of cultural politics and economics together as a networked political economy?

The panel comprised of three 15-minute presentations and was followed with a lively question and answer session.

Dr Simon Frost. Bournemouth University. https://staffprofiles.bournemouth.ac.uk/display/sfrost See Reading, Wanting and Broken Economics: A Twenty-First-Century Study of Readers and Bookshops in Southampton Around 1900. N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2021.

Dr Frost talked about the complexity of book retail, drawing on his research from the 1900s to contemporary times. He argued that in the 1900s books became a commodity culture and this continues today. There may be radical differences in operational mode between 1900 and now but the situation remains the same: the promise of a gain means we accept books are retailed to us.

Prof. Corinna Norrick-Rühl. University of Münster: https://www.uni-muenster.de/Anglistik/bookstudies/team/prof.dr.norrick-ruehl.html See The Novel as Network: Forms, Ideas, Commodities. Cham: Palgrave, 2020 (co-edited with Tim Lanzendörfer); see also Bookshelves in the Age of the COVID-19 Pandemic. Cham: Palgrave, forthcoming (co-edited with Shafquat Towheed).

Professor Norrick-Rühl talked about the bookstore as node, and is crossroads between all relationships in books. Bookstores fulfil a variety of functions and this is how they continue to exist as they are emmeshed in cultural networks, entrepreneurial networks, and educational networks. Therefore, framing bookstores as nodes in overlapping networks is useful to this understanding.

Dr Ryan Raffaelli. Harvard Business School: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/profile.aspx?facId=257292 See Reinventing Retail: The Novel Resurgence of Independent Bookstores, HBS working papers series, 2020.

Dr Raffaelli again underscored how bookstores are different to other stores and different to usual economics. Bookstores defied the predicted decline of the 1990s and there was a rise in independent bookstores in the 2010s. The discussion focussed on three factors which make bookshops ‘different’: community, curation and convening.

History of Bookselling
2022-03-18 14:00 - 15:30
In this first themed event, the BRN explored the history of bookselling, beginning with two fifteen minute presentations. The first was from Dr Will Smith who is a practising bookseller at Sam Read Booksellers in the Lake District, followed by Professor Simon Eliot who is a book historian at the Institute for English Studies. Short extracts of these presentations are below.

‘Uncovering multi-generational histories within Sam Read Booksellers’ – Dr Will Smith (Sam Read Booksellers)

In this presentation Dr Will Smith explored the rich history of Sam Read Booksellers, a bookstore that opened between The Fells in 1887 and is still a thriving shop today. Will described that there is an active oral history group in the area and the community share past photographs and accounts, and that the books that are in the photographs of the store can be used to date the photos. Will told the group how he is actively trawling through the history to put it all together, and how he has found some fascinating insights, such as that E.M. Forster visited the store in 1907 to post a letter.

Will explained that he is interested in what sort of questions people form for critical accounts of bookselling and in what we mean by the history of a bookshop; whether it is ownership, documents and photographs, generations of selling, or the lives of the people.

‘Archives of All Sorts’ – Professor Simon Eliot (Institute of English Studies, London).

Professor Eliot’s presentation considered witting and unwitting testimony, and for historians access to the unwitting is highly valuable. An archive of all sorts can reveal things that were never intended or thought of by the compilers. In this talk, Professor Eliot examined what could not have been known without systematic investigation of archives. One example of unwitting evidence is printed public library catalogues, and that the number of copies available of certain books were measure of popularity. Another example explored during the presentation was that archives reveal messages that included hidden meaning for both sender and receiver. For example messages sent from publisher John Camden Hotten (1832 – 1873) detailed closure of a bookshop, but the underlying message was that one stream of clandestine publishing of eroticism was no longer going to be available, and this can be understood through the archives.

The event then moved on to a series of lightning talks. We were delighted to receive a high number of volunteers to give a presentation, which evidenced how much research in this area there is being done.
