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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.
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.
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