To celebrate the coming of winter and the holiday that comes with it, we met on Friday, the 16th of December to talk about books about bookshops. Eben Muse, the author of Fantasies of the Bookstore, started the conversation off by presenting some of the books on his bookshelves that celebrate bookshops, fantasize about them, direct you to them, or tell you how to run your own. The discussion that followed included some other gems, including (in no particular order):

  • The Cat Who Saved Books, by Sosuke Natsukawa
  • Mr Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan
  • The Bookseller’s Tale by Martin Latham
  • The Bookshop in Algiers, by Kaouther Adimi
  • Louise Erdrich The Sentence
  • Book on the Bookshelf
  • This Is My Bookstore Postcard Set
  • The British Book Trade Directory (1934)
  • American Booktrade Directory (1935)
  • The Strange Library, Haruki Murakami
  • This is My Bookstore postcard collection
  • Armin, der Buchhändler by Rotraut Susanne Berner
  • Lunch at the Shop, by Peter Miller
  • The Book on the Bookshelf by Henry Petroski
  • Free to All: Carnegie Libraries & American Culture, 1890-1920 by Abigail A. Van Slyck

By Eben J Muse

Dr Eben J. Muse is a Reader in Bookselling at the School of Arts, Culture(s) and Language at Bangor University. He has been Co-Director of Stephen Colclough Centre for the History and Culture of the Book since 2016. He was raised in a bookstore in Massachusetts which he now owns, and he conducts research into the business and culture of bookstores. He is currently editing the Books & Bookselling strand of the Cambridge Elements Series Publishing and Book Culture and co-director of the Bookselling Research Network.