Bookshops: Mostly Paper and Magic

A bookshop is a special (maybe enchanted) place found all over the world and staffed by booksellers who seem to have a preternatural ability to put just the right book in your hands. 

People have been buying and selling books since about 300 BCE. During the latter part of the Roman empire, when all the best homes included a personal library, the book trade was boomin’. Back then, shops posted a list of titles for sale on their doors. 

The kind of store we think of when someone says ‘bookshop’ was initially tied closely to printing. The first booksellers were also editors and printers who made the books, then sold them to the reading public. Eventually, those specialties split apart: Publishers worked with authors to create books, and booksellers placed them into the hands of readers. 

And we’re all better for it.

In this episode, we talk about the world’s oldest bookshop and discuss some remarkable bookstores around the world, including a bookshop in paradise and Scotland’s National Book Town. We also learn about a shocking bookstore-related medical phenomenon! Then we recommend great books that took us inside the world of bookshops.

Here are the books about bookshops we recommend on the show:

The Sentence by Louise Erdrich

Bibliophile: An Illustrated Miscellany by Jane Mount

Spine Poems by Annette Dauphin Simon

Bloomsbury Girls by Natalie Jenner

Booked to Die by John Dunning

The Last Equation of Isaac Severy by Nova Jacobs

Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

The Little Paris Bookshop by Nina George

The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin

For more on the books we recommend, plus the other cool stuff we talk about, visit our show notes.

Transcript of Bookshops: Mostly Paper and Magic.

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