Bookselling Research Network

Developing Collaterals: Book Retail Networks in the Creation of Social Prosperity
2022-05-25 14:00 - 15:00 (Europe/London)
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.
