Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption (review)

Most of those in the book business have a tendency to regard their trade as being morally and intellectually set apart from other commercial activities. Many will have grown up with books, will have been shaped by them, inspired by them, perhaps even transformed by them. There is an almost evangelical fervor in some booksellers, as though they were members of a genteel version of the Salvation Army.

Any history of twentieth-century bookselling must take this factor into account because it helps explain the peculiar nature of selling books in a free market economy. In this respect, as in many others, Laura J. Miller has done a good job. An early chapter sets the context by providing a broad chronological survey of bookselling in the U.S.A. from the colonial period to book marketing via the Web. Predominant in this account is the “tyranny of distance,” a considerable problem for any trade, but a remarkable burden for the book trade that has to transmit large quantities of commonly low-priced goods frequently to a wide scatter of customers. This was made even more difficult by the fact that in the U.S.A. outlets were commonly few and far between. For instance, in 1930, as Miller points out, two-thirds of all counties in the U.S.A. had no book outlet of any sort.

Traditionally, booksellers have not regarded themselves as mere tradesmen, nor did most of their customers. They were there to provide guidance and support in the choice of books, recommending other titles by a favorite author, or other authors who tackled a favorite subject in a similar way. Miller has an interesting chapter that focuses on this historically elusive relationship between bookseller and book buyer. The buyer, of course, commonly wanted two mutually exclusive things from the bookseller: advice and personal attention on the one hand, and books at the cheapest possible price on the other. How book outlets of all types tried to square this circle is one of the main subjects of the rest of the book. Another is the way in which bookselling has often had to rely on other sorts of retail to support it. In the earlier twentieth century, this was frequently done by the bookshop taking the form of a department within a department store.

Retailing practice for much of the twentieth century had stressed the virtues of standardization, something that, despite the protestations of independent booksellers, was put into vigorous effect in the emerging malls of North America by such chains as Crown Books, Waldenbooks, B. Dalton, Barnes & Noble, and Borders. A number of these firms then developed some of their shops into large-scale, multifunction bookstores. As Miller observes, many of the independent bookstores that conducted a spirited fightback in the last few decades of the twentieth century also found it necessary to offer other goods or services to help shift the books. This will come as no surprise to a historian of the book: in Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for instance, most bookshops were multiform offering newspapers, stationery, and an array of fancy goods and patent medicines, which moved faster and more certainly than books. Bookselling per se was, and is, an uncertain and frequently unrewarding occupation with endemic cash flow problems. Even the big names were not invulnerable and this book contains a somber appendix that details the ups and downs (more of downs than ups) of some of the larger bookselling chains.

The subject is a large one, and one does not blame Laura Miller for concentrating pretty exclusively on the U.S.A. However, it would have been better had there been a little more acknowledgement that there was a world of bookselling beyond the borders of the U.S.A., a world that shared many of its problems with U.S. booksellers. Until the final chapters, where...