Bookselling Research Network

In Conversation with Jane Cholmeley
2024-10-25 14:00 - 15:30 (Europe/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 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.
