Book Review: ‘The Bookshop,’ by Evan Friss

Probably by intention, Friss’s book is organized like the best of such literary emporiums: a little higgledy-piggledy, with surprise diversions here and there. He approvingly considers the Instagram wall at Books Are Magic, the novelist Emma Straub’s shop in the Cobble Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, and less so the eponymous bibliosmia fragrance bottled by Powell’s, the Portland, Ore., landmark.

There are short sections on attractions like WonTon, the tuxedo cat who presided over a store in Richmond, Va., that was featured in Gary Shteyngart’s novel “Lake Success.” Cats in bookstores could be, in these days of their sudden political surge, a whole other book; “The Bookshop” is necessarily selective, and I looked without success for Bartleby, Mr. Eliot and Skimbleshanks, the lazy employees of E. Shaver in Savannah, Ga.

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 fulfill, since the closure of its brick-and-mortar stores, is hosting a function. Friss tells the story behind the famous group photograph of mostly poets during a party at the much-missed Gotham Book Mart, with Gore Vidal jostling in and William Carlos Williams excluded. (W.H. Auden, climbing to the top, “was one of the few who seemed to be enjoying himself.”) And he resurrects Burt Britton, the cranky bearded Brooklynite and unlikely socialite who worked in the Strand basement and got his own memorable wingding after he persuaded a tremendous variety of authors to draw self-portraits and compiled them into a book.

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 marginalized and disenfranchised. He also reconstructs havens of hatred like the Aryan Book Store in Los Angeles. Now ideas good and bad are delivered in the same plain brown wrapper.

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 theater, at least, the book business is generally more mobile and nimble, Friss shows, and that is cause for optimism. From Bertha Mahony’s Caravan Bookshop of 1920 — “a motorized truck with two generous awnings that spread like wings” — to Jen Fisher’s outdoor VorteXity on Avenue A, “The Bookshop” considers how little overhead is required to nourish the fundamental human hunger for knowledge.

THE BOOKSHOP: A History of the American Bookstore | By Evan Friss | Viking | 416 pp. | $30