Evan Friss and The Bookshop
Few academic authors achieve great success, but a recent exception is JMU professor, Evan Friss, who published his history of US bookshops last year. The Bookshop became a New York Times Best Seller; Time listed it among its 100 Must-Read Books of 2024, People magazine named it Book of the Week, and, currently, The Bookshop is in its seventh printing. Having no idea that his book would achieve such fame, Friss saiys it felt “strange” to receive so much attention, but he also told JMU interviewer Josette Keelor, “It’s been very rewarding, and surprising and overwhelming.”
The Bookshop has received such popularity because it’s not the typical academic fare: instead of being full of facts and a bit dry, it is both factual and highly entertaining. Friss presents a full history of bookshops in the US, most of them operated by independent owners; he begins with Benjamin Franklin’s printing shop/bookstore and ends with modern mega-stores like Barnes & Noble and newer privately owned shops. His clear preference is for independent bookstores, believing that they serve communities in ways other than mercantile. Bookshops have long provided sanctuaries for like-minded readers who come to buy books, to talk about books, or even to find a quiet nook in which to read.
Friss grew up in Columbia, Maryland, where the only bookstore was the local Barnes and Noble. He says that he “was an avid reader but never really hung out at bookstores.” He graduated from the University of Maryland with a B. A. in History in 2002. A professor there, Gary Gerstle, stimulated Friss’s desire to become an historian. He went to graduate school at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, where he earned both M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in history. His first two works evolved from his dissertation—his interest in city transportation, especially the urban use of bicycles. Friss has taught at JMU since 2012, earning the rank of Professor of History is 2024.
Friss became interested in independent bookstores during his years in New York City where he met his wife Amanda who then worked at Three Lives & Company, an independent bookstore in Manhattan. Amanda opened Parentheses Book s in Harrisonburg in September 2023.
For the most part, The Bookshop presents a chronological, illustrated history of the bookstores in the United States, but Friss breaks the chronology by including brief vignettes throughout the book. He says he includes these stories because they contain interesting material that did not fit into the overall narrative. After his first chapter on Benjamin Franklin, for example, he includes a two-page essay, “The Smell,” in which he describes the particular odor that permeate bookstores. Powell’s bookstore in Portland even tried to bottle and sell the odor; with “mixed reviews.”
The Bookstore shows Friss’s expertise in research. He visited more than 100 bookstores throughout the US, many in New York City, but others all over the country. He interviewed everybody important in bookselling from Len Regio who created Barnes & Noble to author Ann Patchett who established the highly success Parnassas Books in Nashville in 2011.He also spent many hours in archival research, uncovering detailed information on bookstores of the past. He chose to highlight the shops with the most interesting stories.
For booksellers from the past, like Francess Steloff who opened Gotham Book Mart in NYC in 1920, Friss’s archival research yielded positive results. He makes readers know this woman who continued to work at Gotham as late as1967. Of her importance, Friss writes, “She was an amazing, charismatic convener of people, who brought intellects, writers, poets, artists of all stripes into bookshop, which became a home of modernists and . . . people who were deemed cultural misfits.”
Friss covers the wide variety of stores set up through the years. Among them was Oscar Wilde, in New York City, an early LGBTQ+ bookshop that closed in 2009 and Drum & Spears in Washington, D.C. a major Black bookstore and cultural center that operated until1974. He includes another off-beat shop, Aryan Book Store in Los Angeles, owned by Nazi sympathizer, Han Diebel whose store displayed “a small Adolph Hitler statue on a bookcase, swastikas everywhere, and books, magazines, and pamphlets espousing antisemitism.” Established in 1933, the shop was raided by the FBI after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Friss also covers the communist based Workers book shops set up in various US cities during the 1930s. A vignette that follows this chapter tells of Roxanne J. Cody, who opened RJ Julia, an independent bookstore in Madison, Connecticut , to honor her grandmother who died in the Holocaust.
Another chapter covers the extensive book department in the Marshall Field Department store in Chicago where Macella Hahner ran the department and became a power in bookselling between the two world wars. Friss also writes about the Strand in NYC which remains in business; he also covers the sidewalk booksellers in New York City and Boston of the 1980s and ‘90s. They had great success at the time.
The Bookstore ends with a detailed study of Ann Patchett’s successful book store in Nashville. He believes that in spite of the power of mass booksellers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble, independent bookstores, like hers, will continue to thrive: “Though. . . the number of bookstores and booksellers, indie and other, has long been dwindling, there’s also been a new wave of booksellers who have begun to change the face of American bookselling.” Friss’s book has appeal for all readers.
