{"id":26957,"date":"2023-03-02T08:30:10","date_gmt":"2023-03-02T08:30:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/research.reading.ac.uk\/research-blog\/?p=26957"},"modified":"2023-03-01T15:15:07","modified_gmt":"2023-03-01T15:15:07","slug":"bookshops-a-world-book-day-appreciation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/research.reading.ac.uk\/research-blog\/2023\/03\/02\/bookshops-a-world-book-day-appreciation\/","title":{"rendered":"Bookshops: a World Book Day appreciation"},"content":{"rendered":"

On this World Book Day, I am reflecting on how my love of bookshops has informed my recent research. I am originally from the US and I worked in all sorts of bookshops throughout college and after \u2013 a chain retailer, independent, and second hand \u2013 and, for a time, I was surrounded by thousands of books on a nearly daily basis, but also the people and worlds they were linked to.<\/p>\n

\"Shelves<\/p>\n

I attended bookshop-hosted events, including poetry readings, music sets, and performance art pieces. And I met all sorts of odd and interesting characters.<\/p>\n

There was Paul, who wandered into my friends\u2019 second hand shop and spun wild tales of living abroad (including in a castle) I didn\u2019t believe until I bumped into him in a bookshop in Berlin years later; there was Mike, who had a rough go after a few decades in Paris, and who, while I assisted him in building bookcases for the independent we worked at, insisted I couldn\u2019t go to graduate school until I read Moby-Dick<\/em>; and Carolyn, who, at my first bookshop job at a chain retailer, quietly but insistently prodded me into considering a world of literature outside of the little corner of interests I then held.<\/p>\n

Bookshops, in my formative years, brought together my university life, the literary and arts community, and all the readerly local characters of my hometown.<\/p>\n

So, when I was researching my doctoral dissertation on modernist periodicals and learned that Dylan Thomas\u2019s first book, Eighteen Poems<\/em>, had been published by the bookseller David Archer, I had to know more about the seller.<\/p>\n

I wasn\u2019t disappointed. Archer\u2019s bookshop in 1930\u2019s London, much like the independents and second hand shops I frequented, was more than a retail space \u2013 Archer published, housed, and otherwise aided his friends, the shop became known as a meeting-place, and occasionally a hiding-place, and for a brief time seemed to be the centre of all that was interesting in literary London.<\/p>\n

\"Old<\/p>\n

It was with the publication of Huw Osborne\u2019s The Rise of the Modernist Bookshop<\/em> in 2015, where I was introduced to other booksellers contemporary with Archer, that I began to appreciate this cultural institution as a possible area for further scholarly inquiry. And presently, I am researching early twentieth-century booksellers who, like Archer, had some vital role in local literary, social, or political networks.<\/p>\n

There is Sylvia Beach, who famously published James Joyce\u2019s Ulysses<\/em> in 1922, and whose Shakespeare and Company was a vital source of reading material for the expats and other visitors of interwar Paris.<\/p>\n

Harold Monro opened The Poetry Bookshop in 1913 in London with an eye on providing a centre for all things poetry-related, and he published periodicals, anthologies, and broadsheets, as well as hosted regular readings at the shop.<\/p>\n

Madge Jenison and Mary Mowbray-Clarke opened The Sunwise Turn in 1916, and Jenison\u2019s memoir about the bookshop captures the eclectic world of literary and artistic characters they and their shop were involved with.<\/p>\n

Yet, beyond these three, there were dozens, if not hundreds of bookshops adopting the model of the bookshop as more than a retail space at this time \u2013 a real centre for literary and artistic production.<\/p>\n

And while today this form of bookshop feels increasingly rare, there are plenty of bookshops who publish, promote, or are otherwise engaged in their local communities: Five Leaves Bookshop<\/a> (Nottingham), Book-ish<\/a> (Crickhowell), New Beacon Books<\/a> (London), and many, many others. (One valuable resource for finding more is the London Bookshop Map<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Finally, to note, there are also plenty of scholars similarly engaged and interested in bookshops \u2013 there is University of Reading\u2019s own Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing<\/a> and MAPP Project<\/a>, as well as the Bookselling Research Network<\/a>, formed in the UK but comprised of scholars and booksellers from around the globe. The research world of the bookish is large and largely friendly, and I am delighted to be a part of it in Reading.<\/p>\n

Dr Matthew Chambers<\/a> is a Visiting Research Fellow in the Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing at the University of Reading.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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