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10 results

Women Booksellers in the Twentieth Century

Women Booksellers in the Twentieth Century
  • Hidden Behind the Bookshelves
  • Samantha J. Rayner
  • Published online:
    17 January 2025
    Print publication:
    30 January 2025
    • Element
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  • The British women booksellers who built and ran successful businesses before, during, and after the Second World War have largely been forgotten. This Element seeks to reclaim some of these histories from where they lie hidden or obscured in archives, accounts of the book trade of the time, and other sources. Though they were often called 'formidable', this research reveals astonishing impact at local, national, and international levels. Divided into four main sections, the Element first gives a literature review of materials about booksellers, before giving a short context to bookselling, the book trade, and book buyers and readers of the early twentieth century. A third section examines the position of women in society at that time, including how they were viewed as part of the book trade; the final section provides histories of nine women booksellers. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Selling Books with Algorithms

Selling Books with Algorithms
  • Anna Muenchrath
  • Published online:
    24 November 2024
    Print publication:
    28 November 2024
  • In 1997 Amazon started as a small online bookseller. It is now the largest bookseller in the US and one of the largest companies in the world, due, in part, to its implementation of algorithms and access to user data. This Element explains how these algorithms work, and specifically how they recommend books and make them visible to readers. It argues that framing algorithms as felicitous or infelicitous allows us to reconsider the imagined authority of an algorithm's recommendation as a culturally situated performance. It also explores the material effects of bookselling algorithms on the forms of labor of the bookstore. The Element ends by considering future directions for research, arguing that the bookselling industry would benefit from an investment in algorithmic literacy.
The Spaces of Bookselling

The Spaces of Bookselling
  • Stores, Streets, and Pages
  • Kristen Doyle Highland
  • Published online:
    24 February 2023
    Print publication:
    09 March 2023
  • The spaces of bookselling have as many stories to tell as do the books for sale. More than static backgrounds for bookselling, these dynamic spaces both shape individual and collective behaviors and perceptions and are shaped by the values and practices of booksellers and book buyers. This Element focuses primarily on bookselling in the United States from the 19th through the 21st centuries and examines three key bookselling spaces-the store, the street, and the catalogue. Following an introduction, the second section considers how the material space of bookstores shapes social engagement in and cultural values associated with the bookstore. The third section turns to itinerant and sidewalk booksellers and the ways in which they use the physical, social, and legal space of the street to craft geographies of belonging. And the final section pages through bookseller catalogues, examining them as a significant genre that works to spatialize the bookstore.
Fantasies of the Bookstore

Fantasies of the Bookstore
  • Eben J. Muse
  • Published online:
    27 June 2022
    Print publication:
    28 July 2022
  • This Element surveys the place of the bookstore in the creative imagination (the fantasies of the bookstore) through a study of novels in which bookstores play a prominent role in the setting or plot. Nearly 500 'bookstore novels' published since the first in 1917 have been identified. The study borrows the concept of 'meaningful locations' from the field of human geography to assess fictional bookstores as narrative events rather than static backgrounds. As a meaningful location, the bookstore creates the potential for events that can occur both within the place of the store and in the wider space within which it functions. Elements of the narrative space include its spatio-temporal location, its locale or composition, and the events which these elements generate to define the bookstore's sense of place.
Entrepreneurial Identity in US Book Publishing in the Twenty-First Century

Entrepreneurial Identity in US Book Publishing in the Twenty-First Century
  • Rachel Noorda
  • Published online:
    06 September 2021
    Print publication:
    23 September 2021
  • Entrepreneurship underpins many roles within the publishing industry, from freelancing to bookselling. Entrepreneurs are shaped by the contexts in which their entrepreneurship is situated (social, political, economic, and national). Additionally, entrepreneurship is integral to occupational identity for book publishing entrepreneurs. This Element examines entrepreneurship through the lens of identity and narrative based on interview data with book publishing entrepreneurs in the US Book publishing entrepreneurship narratives of independence, culture over commerce, accidental profession, place, risk, (in)stability, busyness, and freedom are examined in this Element.

  • 33 - Book reviewing

  • from II - LITERATURE AND THE CULTURE OF LETTERS
  • Edited by Michael F. Suarez, SJ, University of Virginia, Michael L. Turner, Bodleian Library, Oxford
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain
    Published online:
    28 September 2010
    Print publication:
    29 October 2009, pp 631-648

  • Summary

    The establishment and rapid spread of general book reviewing in the second half of the eighteenth century clearly altered the balance of book publishing, introducing a new factor into the marketing and reading of books. In the Critical Review's striking phrase, reviewing 'inclosed what was once a common field', and, whether they liked or loathed it, fought it or exploited it, booksellers, authors and readers came to expect this further factor in the publishing relationship. Advertising and the sight of the physical volumes themselves were no longer necessarily the primary means of initial acquaintance with books. Before ever reading booksellers' advertisements in newspapers or books, before encountering title pages, prefaces and other physical aspects of books in shops or libraries, consumers might well already have seen, and sometimes paid for, the opinions of reviewers. Bookselling has never been the same.

  • 3 - The book as a commodity

  • from PART II - ECONOMIC, LEGAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS
  • Edited by Michael F. Suarez, SJ, University of Virginia, Michael L. Turner, Bodleian Library, Oxford
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain
    Published online:
    28 September 2010
    Print publication:
    29 October 2009, pp 83-117

  • Summary

    Commercial ingenuity dominates the history of printing and publishing in Britain in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and in many ways booksellers, but also authors and readers, came to treat the various products of the printing press more as market commodities, more as goods directed to specific audiences. The expansion in literary commerce turned, like all other domestic industries, on the attractiveness of the product. The fundamental determinant of the market for new publications was price, and although it is extremely perilous to do so, one should try to establish the course of the relative price of new books. In establishing a wholesale price structure, the London publishers had to consider the mark-up necessary to make the participation of retailers worthwhile. Bookselling success derived far less from supply-led production than it did from the successful exploitation of cartels and techniques to create the appearance of new markets.

  • 13 - London and the central sites of the English book trade

  • from I - LONDON AND THE ‘COUNTRY’
  • Edited by Michael F. Suarez, SJ, University of Virginia, Michael L. Turner, Bodleian Library, Oxford
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain
    Published online:
    28 September 2010
    Print publication:
    29 October 2009, pp 291-308

  • Summary

    Mapping the location of printers, booksellers and allied businesses deepens our understanding of the commercial and cultural orientation of the book trade between the late seventeenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries. As this chapter seeks to demonstrate, the business of publishing and bookselling, characterized by increasing diversity and a steady expansion of production, was closely allied to the transformation of London during this period. With some important exceptions, seventeenth-century London printers continued to congregate in two broad areas of activity, one outside the City focused on Smithfield, and the other stretching broadly southwards from the cathedral to Paul's Wharf and London Bridge. Both old and new London venues sustained the advance of the eighteenth-century book trade. Several ancient sites had supported book-traders, some under the same distinctive trade sign, for generations stretching back before the Civil War, but recent research also reveals the recurrent reuse of many print and book shops by different trades.

  • 38 - Collecting and the antiquarian book trade

  • from III - SPECIALIST BOOKS AND MARKETS
  • Edited by Michael F. Suarez, SJ, University of Virginia, Michael L. Turner, Bodleian Library, Oxford
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain
    Published online:
    28 September 2010
    Print publication:
    29 October 2009, pp 711-722

  • Summary

    A significant feature of eighteenth-century collecting is the rise of the scholar-collector, a phenomenon that coincides, not surprisingly, with the increasing interest in English genealogy and topography, antiquarianism, and the editing of earlier English literature, especially Shakespeare's works. By the fourth quarter of the eighteenth century, antiquarian book collecting and bookselling had developed into stable, flourishing and mutually supportive interests. Indeed, the bookseller's business was largely supported by collectors, most of whom were clergymen, antiquaries and scholars, often with a particular fondness for Shakespeare. Between 1695 and 1835, the collecting of antiquarian books and manuscripts moved from the country estate to the scholar's study, then returned from the study to the country estate or elegant town house. In the earlier period, many of the collections ended up in institutions; in the middle and later periods, many, but not all, went back to the auction rooms or booksellers' shops.