Non-fiction corner: Browsing Is a Pleasure in This History of the Bookstore

We all know of food deserts: landscapes where there’s no access to fresh produce, just a Taco Bell or two. Less fretted over are the book barrens. It is now possible to visit many places in our great democracy and not come anywhere close to a bookstore. (Public libraries are hanging in there — for now — though younger people overwhelmingly experience them through smartphones.)

Of course, one can order many exciting titles to be delivered cheaply — overnight even! — from this amazing online entity named for a river in South America. Perhaps you’ve heard of it.

Grossly inadequate, asserts Evan Friss, a historian and husband to a former clerk at Manhattan’s Three Lives, in “The Bookshop,” a spirited defence of this important, odd and odds-defying American retail category. (He previously has written about bicycles, another common good that needs more support.)

A book about bookstores risks being a gag, like Kramer’s coffee-table book about coffee tables.

It seems assured placement up front with the tote bags, mugs and other impulse merch that shops stock in order to pad their often dismal profit margins. And yet there have been many engrossing memoirs by booksellers, most recently by Paul Yamazaki of the fabled City Lights in San Francisco, and another from the antiquarian Marius Kociejowski. Nor should one overlook the epistolary classic 84, Charing Cross Road, by Helene Hanff.

It’s not just that those who spend a lot of time around literature surely absorb some of the ability to write by osmosis; it’s that their workplaces are, as the great Christopher Morley was paid $300 by the Chicago department store Marshall Field to write, “places of magic,” where lives can be changed through serendipitous, algorithm-free encounters of both pages and people.

As Friss acknowledges, bookstores are “places to lose and find oneself” and therefore frequent settings for “sappy and tropey” romantic comedy. Fred Astaire smooching Audrey “Funny Face” Hepburn as they tidy shelves in the West Village. Hugh Grant, as a proprietor named William Thacker, helping Julia Roberts browse in “Notting Hill.” Nora Ephron’s Sally running into Harry at an Upper West Side Shakespeare & Company (“someone is staring at you in Personal Growth!”). And most famously, Ephron’s “You’ve Got Mail,” which demonised a Barnes & Noble-like behemoth. Someone should greenlight a sequel about how customers began begging to save their local B&N once Jeff Bezos settled into his long reign of corrugated cardboard.

Disappointment at not finding your own fave in his copious index, Friss writes, speaks to how important these institutions are: “That so many people feel differently about their bookstore than they do about their grocery store or electronics store or any other store is part of the point.” One of the many functions of a bookstore Amazon cannot fulfil, since the closure of its brickand-mortar stores, is hosting a function.

Word peddlers are not only themselves amazing “characters,” but sometimes revolutionaries, beginning with Benjamin Franklin. Friss documents how now-closed stores like the Drum & Spear in Washington, D.C., oriented toward Black readers, and the L.G.B.T.Q. Oscar Wilde on Mercer Street served as gathering places for the marginalised and disenfranchised.

A general falloff in American letters can’t be pinned on Amazon, though, so much as ever more technological distractions. If a slightly less fabulous invalid than the theatre, at least, the book business is generally more mobile and nimble, Friss shows, and that is cause for optimism. “The Bookshop” considers how little overhead is required to nourish the fundamental human hunger for knowledge.