For ‘The Bookshop’ author, bookstores were ‘sites of resistance’

In the 1960s and ‘70s, small bookshops provided spaces where ideas and activism could flourish. Today, while indie bookstores can be considered “endangered species,” their vitality as community gathering places is thriving.

What do bookstores and bicycles have in common? For Evan Friss, the author of “The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore” as well as “The Cycling City” and “On Bicycles,” the answer is clear. These books are less about reading and cycling and more about the ecosystems that developed around these pursuits. (Find our review of “The Bookshop” here.)

Dr. Friss, a historian and professor at James Madison University, spoke with the Monitor about how bookstores have endured. The conversation has been edited and condensed.

Why write about bookstores now?

Precarity has always been a part of bookselling, but there’s ... pretty concrete evidence [of] fewer bookstores today than there have been over much of American history. So from the Civil War era to the early 20th century, mid-20th century, and then into the 21st century ... bookstores are on the verge of being at least tagged as endangered species. So although it’s part of this rhetoric and theme of bookselling that they are vulnerable institutions, that’s probably never been truer than today. 

How would you describe the impact of the American bookshop on the Civil Rights and social movements of the 20th century?

Especially in the 1960s and 1970s, activist bookstores were really at the center of a variety of political and social movements. Most people are familiar with the Stonewall Uprising and the role that gay bars played in forging communities and also as sites of resistance. But for a lot of these [marginalized] communities, the real intellectual center and also the headquarters for activism was a bookstore where intellectuals are circulating ideas. [These] kinds of bookstores have been underappreciated as organizing hubs for some of the most powerful political and social movements of the 20th century. 

Who is your favorite unsung hero of bookshop history?

She wasn’t an unsung hero, but she’s not a household name today. I would say it’s Frances Steloff from Gotham Book Mart, which was a powerhouse in New York City and was really a kind of haven for modernist literature. She would stock books that were very hard to find elsewhere, books that push the edge and sometimes were banned by censors, books that were avant-garde. She was a cultural tastemaker, and people who were interested in modernist literature would almost treat her bookstore like a schoolhouse. She became a kind of host, therapist, grandmother, leader for a whole community of New Yorkers. 

Another was a woman named Marcella Burns Hahner, who ran the book department in Marshall Field’s, the department store in Chicago. For several decades, the Marshall Field’s book department was one of the most highly regarded bookshops in the world, and it was gigantic. People ... looked to it as a model for a place that could sell tons of books and also cater to individual customers’ needs. She had her sales clerks, on rainy days, call up regular customers and make book recommendations and offer to deliver the books to them for free that day by horse.  

Many of the bookstores have closed. Is there one you wish you could have visited?

I profiled Drum & Spear [closed in 1974], which [was] a Black bookstore in Washington, D.C., and I had the privilege of talking to a lot of the people who started it. They were college students [then], many of whom had been involved in civil rights protests, but fortunately, a lot of them are still alive. And talking to them and seeing the way that they still kind of have these activist mentalities and the way that they conjured up the space and the atmosphere helped me write about it. I tried to capture what it was like, but words can never really fully capture the room. I would have liked to talk to them as 20-year-olds and see what they were like then and what they had to say.