Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Bookshop: A History of Bookselling from the Dawn of Print to the Twenty-First Century

The Bookshop: A History of Bookselling from the Dawn of Print to the Twenty-First Century

Pettegree, Andrew

Hardcover

General ReferenceGeneral European HistoryGeneral World History

Publisher Price: $32.00

PREORDER - Expected ship date October 13, 2026

ISBN10: 1541607279
ISBN13: 9781541607279
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: Oct 13 2026
Pages: 320
Language: English
The global history of the rise and transformation of bookstores, from medieval book merchants to today's neighborhood indies.

This is the arresting and ultimately optimistic story of the making and marketing of print culture. Here is a book for every book-lover to buy. -Jeff Jarvis, author The Gutenberg Parenthesis

Whether it's a local indie bookshop, an online megaretailer, or a chain bookstore, the place we buy books is an essential part of our reading lives. Bookstores connect books to potential buyers and convert idle browsers into committed readers. Yet, as historian Andrew Pettegree reveals, it took more than five centuries after Gutenberg for bookstores as we know them to emerge.

The Bookshop tells a sweeping history of the bookstore. It celebrates the ingenuity of booksellers, from the smugglers who carried contraband books across borders, to the innovators who created the global distribution networks that define books and bookselling today. Even though few bookshops lasted more than a few years during the best of times, booksellers relentlessly sought new ways to get books to readers. Innovators like the squabbling dealers who invented the secondhand bookstore, or Victorian capitalists like W. H. Smith, who built an empire of railroad station book stalls to serve idle passengers, made bookselling what it is today.

The Bookshop is the story of how the bookstore became the indispensable meeting place for book makers and book lovers around the world.

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