The Rise of the Modernist Bookshop : Books and the Commerce of Culture in the Twentieth Century

Concerned with the cultural and economic roles of independent bookstores, this collection considers how eight shops created during the modernist era exceeded their commercial functions to open the spaces of literary production. Understanding these unique social spaces on the threshold of commerce and culture provides a basis for comprehending how the changes to the physical contexts of the twenty-first century reading experience have affected our relationship to books and reading.

The trade in books has always been and remains an ambiguous commercial activity, associated as it is with literature and the exchange of ideas. This collection is concerned with the cultural and economic roles of independent bookstores, and it considers how eight shops founded during the modernist era provided distinctive spaces of literary production that exceeded and yet never escaped their commercial functions. As the contributors show, these booksellers were essential institutional players in literary networks. When the eight shops examined first opened their doors, their relevance to literary and commercial life was taken for granted. In our current context of box stores, online shopping, and ebooks, we no longer encounter the book as we did as recently as twenty years ago. By contributing to our understanding of bookshops as unique social spaces on the thresholds of commerce and culture, this volume helps to lay the groundwork for comprehending how our relationship to books and literature has been and will be affected by the physical changes to the reading experience taking place in the twenty-first century.