Independent
bookstores are undergoing a happy resurgence and yet they are precariously
endangered. There’s a book that serves as
a celebration of independent bookstores everywhere and for all those who love
books: Footnotes From the World’s
Greatest Bookstores by Bob Eckstein.
The
introduction from Eckstern says it all:
“Bookstores
are emotional places both for their patrons and for the employees. They are built on the sweat and tears of
hardworking people, each bookshelf lined with the life work of hundreds of
artists. Each of those books represent
endless hours of grind and toil. Often
the bookstore owner and employees are also writers. Is there a space with more fulfilled or
unfulfilled dreams?
“The
bookstore is also a hangout, a place of solace, a community center, and a venue
for cultural entertainment. There are
many who absolutely live for bookstores and even those who aspire to live in a
bookstore, with some bookstores providing a place to sleep in exchange for
work. What other type of store does
that? The relationship between
bookstores and their customers is give-and-take, reliant on loyalty and
generosity. Customers work on the honor
system and should be applauded-bookstores can be taken advantage of, dispensing
free expertise and human contact only to have their place of business used as a
catalog for online shopping, or a library, or simply a restroom. Bookshop owners and employees are a very
patient group.”
Eckstein,
a New Yorker cartoonist, gathered the
untold stories from 75 of the world’s most renowned bookstores – past and
present – and provided evocative color illustrations of each shop. He literally shows a portrait of our lifelong
love affair with books and the indie bookshops that sell them to us. His renderings cherish these sanctuaries for
learning, dreaming, escaping – each one a unique, character-filled home to the
community it serves.
Some
of the stores featured include:
·
Scribner’s
Bookstore, NYC, 1913-1989.
·
Strand
Book Store, NYC, 1927-Present.
·
Brattle
Book Shop, Boston, 1925-Present.
·
Grolier
Poetry Book Shop, Cambridge, MA, 1927-Present.
·
Powell’s
Books, Portland, Oregon, 1971-Present.
·
Moracan
Book Shop, Bethlehem, PA, 1745-Present.
·
Books
& Books, South Florida, 1982-Present.
·
Giovanni’s
Room, Philadelphia, 1973-Present.
“The
real problem with the book business is that smart people have gotten too busy
to read,” wrote Garrison Keillor in the foreword. “You know it’s true. When my bookstores goes under, I will at last have time to pick up a book,
sit down, and read it for hour after hour.
That’s the good life. I’ll walk
into your bookstore, dear reader, and stand over the fiction table and glance
at the waves, read the first paragraphs and the jacket flaps of fifteen novels,
pick two, go to the counter, commiserate with you about the sad state of the
world, and go home and read. I look
forward to that.”
Book Factoids
·
L.
Ron Hubbard is the most published author in history, according to The Guinness Book of World Records. He released 1,084 books, 29 of which were
novels.
·
Is
book publishing the domain of women? An
AP survey found that nearly 80% of the novels purchased are by women. The majority of literary agents, and book
editors are women as well.
·
Robert
Byrne, in his 1968 book, Writing Rackets,
claimed only 560 of the 182,505 fiction manuscripts submitted to US publishers
each year in the late 1960s were accepted.
That’s one out of every 364.
·
A
little over 70 years ago – in – 1947 – Doubleday became the largest U.S.
Publisher, selling more than 30 million copies annually. Penguin Random House
is the largest book publisher today.
·
Authors
with 100 million-plus copies sold include James Patterson, J.K. Rowling, Jeffrey
Archer, Mary Higgins Clark, Nora Roberts, Anne Rice, Janet Dailey, and E.L.
James, among others.
·
There
are many one-hit wonders, writers who penned amazing breakthrough books that
garnered critical acclaim and great sales figures, but who would never come
close to that success again. Coming to
mind are James Redfield (Celestine
Prophesy), Charles Frazier (Cold
Mountain), James Walter (Bridges of
Madison County), and Xavier Hollander (The
Happy Hooker). Why didn’t they
repeat their success?
Source: An Insider’s Guide to Publishing: Historical Perspectives on the Publishing
Business by David Comfort (Writer’s
Digest: 2013).
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