The Rise of the Modernist Bookshop: Books and the Commerce of Culture in the Twentieth Century ed. by Huw Osborne (review)

‘When we enter bookshops, we engage in a social and spatial act on the threshold of commerce and culture, one that activates material, aesthetic, political, personal, and communal affiliations and commitments’. So begins this collection of eight essays (and a ‘coda’) on a selection of bookshops which ‘opened their doors for the first time between 1913 and 1927’. In fact, not all of them did exactly that, as we shall see, but the scene has to be set somehow. Five of the shops were in the USA, two in London, and one (or two, really) in Paris; all were, primarily, new bookshops, stocking the latest in English-language literature.

The editor is right to assert that ‘we know comparatively little about the book-store owners who created the spaces in which many of these . . . figures worked creatively with one another’, and (even apart from a plethora of anecdotes, usually a gift to the imaginative chronicler) the subject is a promising one. The basic premise of this work is that the bookshops and their owners were participating in the creation of literary texts, rather than just reacting to their appearance: so far, so good. Much of the evidence for this is, of course, already known, and documented elsewhere in considerable detail; but there is plenty of unfamiliar material in this volume, and that is very welcome. However, according to the authors’ summary biographies, only one has ‘worked briefly’ in a bookshop, and so it is hardly surprising that the text fails to convey much of the excitement involved in running even the most modest of establishments.

More worrying is the authors’ tendency to view this corner of book history through a very twenty-first-century prism. In a lengthy (and in places not uninteresting) disquisition on James Hanley’s The German Prisoner, the book’s editor, Huw Osborne, writes ‘The sensuousness of the reading experience and the class associations of this reading act are violently and disturbingly undermined by the homoerotic rape of the principle [sic] object of sensuous pleasure and aesthetic form within the story. When one further reflects that the book was bound in buckram and fifty were printed on vellum, the fleshly quality of this book is even greater’. Jargon aside, it is hard to see what is meant by this. ‘Buckram’ is of course a fabric, and ‘vellum’ in this context usually denotes a kind of paper, rather than an animal skin. The latter, while not unknown as a medium for private press work, would have posed technical difficulties (and cost) that would probably have been beyond Hanley, Lahr, and their printers. In any case, neither the colophon nor Hanley’s bibliography (by Linnea Gibbs; Vancouver: Hoffer, 1980) mention vellum copies at all. The whole edition was ‘limited to five hundred copies for sale to Private Subscribers’, with either ten or fifty additional unnumbered copies bound in black cloth. One is accordingly left with the feeling that an agenda is being pushed beyond its natural limits. (The spelling error, which could happen to anyone, does nonetheless indicate that the book has not been well served by its editors: elsewhere, ‘stationary’ for ‘stationery’ appears more than once.)

The piece on Shakespeare & Company, of Paris, relies on the reader’s acceptance of George Whitman’s business as being a continuation of the one started by Sylvia Beach. Katy Masuga’s somewhat romanticized account fails to convince the present reviewer of this. The chronology is uncomplicated. 1919: Sylvia Beach opens her bookshop, in the rue Dupuytren; 1941: Beach’s shop, by then in the rue de l’Odéon, closes; 1946: George Whitman arrives in Paris; 1951: Whitman opens his bookshop, ‘across from Notre Dame’, and calls it ‘Le Mistral’; 1962: Beach dies; 1964: Whitman renames his shop ‘Shakespeare and Company’. Although there are similarities between the businesses, it...