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The bookstore is a perfumery, rotisserie, patisserie: a dispensary of scents and flavors through which something like a fragrance or bouquet of the book is divined, presumed, sensed. It is where one gives oneself or finds an idea of the book's Idea, a sketch, an allusion, a suggestion. The bookstore opens to the reader the general space of all kinds of opening, furtive glance, brief shedding of light or illumination, drilling, prospecting, sifting, fine-tooth combing, sampling, or summary. It is always a matter of unbinding the tie that holds the volume together and of letting it breathe, puff for a second, a matter also of having it lose its sufficiency and consistency enough so that it can be found only in the zealousness or nonchalance of the fingers that turn its pages.

The book always and only goes from Idea to Idea. Its opening, its enlivened and loosened pages—followed from right to left and from top to bottom, or in the opposite directions and following every possible combination—its patient and meticulous readings as well as its greedy and hurried ones, its studies, commentaries, glosses, analyses, plagiarisms and parodies, only spread ever more widely, ever more impalpably, the substance of its Idea, which ends up losing itself by finding itself metamorphosed, metempsychosed, or metaphorized into other books, into innumerable volumes, booklets, lampoons, essays, pamphlets, opuscules become volumes themselves once more, folios, quartos, octavos, into indefinitely multiplied issues that disperse into the air the dust of sense and ashes of the Idea, an Idea in ashes not for having been put on the pyre, but for having been liberally scattered into the vast cosmos through which shines the star shower of the Idea.

This chapter examines how some people outside the ranks of book professionals have taken action against the spread of large-scale, rationalized bookselling in the U.S. It looks at the activism on the part of two groups: low-level workers at bookstores and residents of communities or citizen-consumers experiencing a changing bookselling environment. This chapter also describes the campaign launched by these groups against chain bookstores and the support they provided to struggling independent bookstores.

The conclusion considers some of the legacies of the Women in Print movement and the Southern lesbian feminists who animated it, by considering contemporary examples of small press publishing and queer distribution networks.

This chapter examines how readers engaged with Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth and the debates surrounding it. The Late Great Planet Earth was explicitly marketed to two distinct audiences—evangelical and trade—in two distinct packages. Zondervan sold it alongside other books on Bible prophecy in Christian bookstores, while Bantam issued an edition with a New Age/science fiction cover to capture the attention of secular readers in trade bookstores. Drawing on reviews on Amazon and other accounts from readers, the chapter considers the notion that the politics of The Late Great Planet Earth can be deduced from the words on the page. It suggests that readers who encountered The Late Great Planet Earth through the lens of millennial anxieties about the nuclear arms race and environmental degradation also read for personal reasons.

This chapter focuses on the history of multifunction bookstore in the U.S. designed to entertain customers. This trend was pioneered by independent bookstores in the 1980s and later reproduced by bookstore chains in a much larger scale that offer food and drink, educational events, and a much needed public space. This chapter analyzes the circumstances within the book trade and within American society more generally that produced this phenomenon.

This chapter examines how feminist bookstores revealed multidimensional and complex female identities that could transform women’s sense of self. These bookstores were often an outgrowth of women’s center libraries, carrying with them it the mission to serve the women’s community. Feminist bookstores collected, in one place, a diverse array of publications that spoke to multiple and overlapping groups. Just one or two books were insufficient for the task; it took stacks of books, what the scholar Kristen Hogan calls “the feminist shelf,” to represent the relationships among race, gender, ethnicity, sexual preference, motherhood, and the myriad other ways in which women define themselves.

In this chapter, the author shares interesting stories that took place at the bookstore during the Sixth International Conference on Creationism, held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in August 2008. The ICC's bookstore, according to the organizers, was the largest collection of creationist materials ever assembled. On the second day of the ICC, a young man approached the author in the bookstore. He asked the young man why he was a creationist, and the latter answered that he came to Christ when he was twelve, but gave no thought to the evolution question until several years later. When he heard a sermon at his church discussing the issue from a creationist perspective, he concluded that the creationists had the better arguments. The author also recalls having a conversation at the same bookstore with one of his students. Finally, he cites sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund's 2010 study in which she surveyed scientists' beliefs about God compared to all Americans.

This chapter examines the field of religious publishing in the 1970s and early 1980s by focusing on Hal Lindsey and C. C. Carlson's The Late Great Planet Earth (1970), a layperson's guide to end-times prophecy, and placing it in its evangelical cultures of letters. Drawing on coverage of religious books in Publishers Weekly and in the religious periodicals Christian Century (liberal Protestant) and Christianity Today (evangelical), it considers how The Late Great Planet Earth became a blockbuster bestseller through its accessible, engaging presentation free of esoteric theology and difficult religious jargon; its appeal to a new, nondenominational youth audience; and its innovative marketing. It also looks at the controversy surrounding the non-inclusion of The Late Great Planet Earth in any bestseller list—despite the fact that it was the best-selling book of the 1970s—because it sold primarily through Christian bookstores.

This introductory chapter discusses the history of bookselling and the book trade in the U.S. It addresses the question of how book professionals position themselves in relation to some general principles of capitalism, including competition, profitability, growth, efficiency, and impersonality. This chapter also traces the evolution of bookselling from independent bookstores to chain stores. It also explores the design of standard and multifunction bookstores and bookseller activism.

This chapter examines the evolution of bookselling in the U.S. since the Civil War. It shows how the retail scene evolved from a highly decentralized group of small booksellers and marginal wholesalers to one dominated by large chains and national distributors employing sophisticated managerial and merchandising techniques to rationalize their work. This chapter suggests that the bookstore chains not only led or institutionalized significant changes within the book industry, but they helped to alter Americans' perceptions of bookstores and book buying.

This chapter examines the history of designing bookstores in the U.S. It investigates how standardization became an important aspect of bookstore chains' efforts to rationalize bookselling. The chapter also discusses the economic and cultural significance of bookstore design, as well as the creation of book displays. This chapter also explains how the construction of identical book outlets benefited the chains by making available economies of scale and by contributing to the chains' populist image.

The importance of the publishing and dissemination of scholarly books and journals remains secure since this process is pivotal to the life blood of academic research. However, the process of scholarly publishing and dissemination in the United States has undergone a series of major substantive developments that have, in many instances, improved the quality and dissemination of content and, in a few cases, impacted negatively on this ecosystem. This chapter provides an analysis of key developments in the scholarly publishing sector, including growth in the number of US colleges and the impact on scholarly publishing output and libraries; concentration in the commercial publishing industry; and changes in both industry employment (and diversity) and the number of bookstores.

Chapter two examines Black-Power activists who founded scores of bookstores throughout the country in the 1960s and ‘70s, hoping to prompt both a “revolution of the mind” and a transformation of business culture in black communities. These activists hailed bookstores as information centers where African American community members could meet to learn about and agitate for radical movements for racial equality and black progress. African American booksellers’ sought to further the work of the Black Power movement by affirming racial pride, celebrating black history and identity, and promoting connections to and interest in Africa. As Black Power declined over the course of the 1970s, however, black bookstores were compelled to deal in an ever broader range of black-authored written works, many of them less political in nature.

In 2004, Google embarked on a historic project to scan and index the contents of the world’s great research libraries. However, the authors and publishers of works in copyright sued, arguing that Google violated copyright law by scanning works without the explicit permission of rights holders. The proposed settlement greatly expanded the stakes, creating a great electronic bookstore where Google would sell (with most of the revenue going to rights holders) access to millions of copyrighted works, something not contemplated in Google’s original scanning project. Before the settlement was approved by the court, it asked the parties for an opportunity to revise the settlement agreement in light of concerns raised by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and hundreds of other objectors. This chapter argues that approval of the original settlement would have been vastly preferable to its rejection, because it provided extraordinary and valuable benefits to readers and scholars. But, in at least one important feature, the DOJ may be pointing the way to a settlement that would be better than the original. The DOJ has expressed concern that the settlement, “appears to create a dangerous probability that only Google would have the ability to market to libraries and other institutions a comprehensive digital-book subscription”.