Evan Friss > Quotes

“The right book put in the right hands at the right time could change the course of a life or many lives.”
― Evan Friss, The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore

“Bookstores also stimulate our senses. Being surrounded by books matters. Sociologists have found that just growing up in a home full of books—mere proximity—confers a lifetime of intellectual benefits.”
― Evan Friss, The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore

“a city without a bookstore wasn't a city worth calling home.”
― Evan Friss, The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore

“He understood that we are what we read. And that what we read is dictated by what authors choose to write, what publishers choose to publish, what printers choose to print, and what, where, and how booksellers choose to sell.”
― Evan Friss, The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore

“Whether independent or corporate, whether in New York or New Mexico, bookstores have been disappearing. If bookstores were animals, they'd be on the list of endangered species.”
― Evan Friss, The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore

“Being surrounded by books matters.”
― Evan Friss, The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore

“In a town like London there are always plenty of not quite certifiable lunatics walking the streets, and they tend to gravitate towards bookshops, because a bookshop is one of the few places where you can hang about for a long time without spending any money.”
― Evan Friss, The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore

“What was once a battle between independents and chains evolved into a war between in-person bookstores (Barnes & Noble included) and Amazon. Suburbanites, many of whom had no other bookstores nearby, rallied to save “my Barnes & Noble” as passionately as activists had once protested to keep them out.”
― Evan Friss, The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore

“Bookstores influence our tastes, our thoughts, and our politics.”
― Evan Friss, The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore

“Whether in mysteries or memoirs, travelogues or true-crime tales, romances or rom-coms, horror or history, bookstores can be more than just passive backdrops. Bookstores can be actors. Bookstores, even the little ones, can shape the world around them. They already have.”
― Evan Friss, The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore

“Conventional wisdom suggests that for bookstores to survive, they need to sell heaps of sidelines (higher-margin nonbook merchandise), host near-daily events, maximize social media, and leverage technology. The Three Lives' simplicity is its brilliance. The tiny bookstore is filled with books and books and books and books....And so, while the same books can be bought from Amazon, often at lower prices, Three Lives offers what an internet behemoth cannot: people, conversation, books to be held and happened upon, floors that creak, atmosphere.”
― Evan Friss, The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore

“The power of the bookstore doesn’t just emanate from the books, the architecture, and the staff. Customers also make the space. Neither home nor work, these “third spaces” function as critical sites for intellectual, social, political, and cultural exchange. They nurture existing communities and foster new ones. They are de facto public spaces, gathering spots. They cost nothing to enter. People often just want company.”
― Evan Friss, The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore

“Sectionalism affected the book business, too. Ticknor counseled Grace Greenwood that she should delete potentially offensive portions of her book that might “effectively cut off the sale… south of ‘Mason & Dixon.’ ” When a Charleston bookseller grumbled about a Ticknor and Fields book that upset his enslaving customers, Ticknor accepted the return without protest.”
― Evan Friss, The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore

“Erudite criminals cased the nation’s finest libraries, marking one-of-a-kind works by tipping them forward along the shelf. Less erudite thieves followed, snatching the books and erasing any identifying stamps inside. The notorious Book Row Gang targeted Harvard and other august institutions between Cambridge and Fourth Avenue.”
― Evan Friss, The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore

“Paperback-only bookstores started appearing in the 1950s, furthering the popularity of softcovers, long dismissed by certain booksellers as an injustice. (Frances Steloff refused to stock them.) Paperbacks challenged the belief that books were items to be treasured and collected, by and for the cultured and well off. Several of the new paperback bookstores evolved into sizable chains. Bookmasters had a half dozen locations in New York, including one on Broadway near Forty-Second Street, next to a pornographic movie house. One of several dozen paperback-only bookstores in the city, it stayed open twenty-four hours a day. (Barnes & Noble later acquired Bookmasters.)”
― Evan Friss, The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore

“Amazon Books was never intended to be like other bookstores. Nor was Amazon.com intended to be an online bookstore. The goal was to become a titanic retailer, an “everything store.” Amazon certainly achieved its goal. In the process, the company transformed the bookstore as we know it.”
― Evan Friss, The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore

“Browsing, or, as he called it, “Book-tasting… makes one hungry for more than he needs for the nourishment of his thinking-marrow.”
― Evan Friss, The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore

“Founded in 1966 by a department store operator, B. Dalton was envisioned as the new frontier in mass-market retail.”
― Evan Friss, The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore

“Benjamin Franklin understood that books could be revolutionary, that what colonists read shaped what colonists thought and, in turn, shaped the course of human events.”
― Evan Friss, The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore

“When they walk in with one book in mind, shoppers often leave with another, a phenomenon about twice as common in brick-and-mortar bookstores than on Amazon. While the internet retailer knows who you are, where you live, and which books (and electric toothbrushes) you’ve bought in the past, the neighborhood bookstore remains an influencer.”
― Evan Friss, The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore

“Waldenbooks started in the Depression with small lending libraries tucked inside department stores.”
― Evan Friss, The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore

“In 1824, a two-thousand-volume bookstore floated down the Erie Canal, stopping at one waterfront town after the next. By the early twentieth century, the closest thing to the traveling bookstore was the traveling library. In 1905, a Maryland librarian employed a wagon, two horses, and a janitor to drive and deliver hundreds of books, house by house, in rural Washington County until a train rammed into his wain.”
― Evan Friss, The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore

“Though Rivington was British, bookstore developed into a particularly American word. In England, it was called a bookshop.”
― Evan Friss, The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore

“As a child, Steloff was "starved for books." Now she was surrounded by them. Thousands and thousands of them.”
― Evan Friss, The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore

“Franklin could now look back and see how the various pieces of his life had coalesced—how printing and bookselling had shaped education, intellectual life, and the means by which colonists consumed information and developed new ideologies, including revolutionary ones. Books hold ideas. Ideas hold power.”
― Evan Friss, The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore

“One joked that books have “been a dying business for at least five thousand years.”
― Evan Friss, The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore

“Bookstores are literary playgrounds and capitlist enterprises, sometimes more obviously one than the other, sometimes seemingly stuck in the space between.”
― Evan Friss, The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore

“Everyone was searching for a mistake, a book priced too low. When one scout discovered a twenty-five-dollar book in Stammer’s twenty-cent stand, he unwisely revealed the bargain just after paying for it. “The king of Fourth Avenue” wasn’t amused. He tore out the page with the author’s inscription—the very page that made the book so valuable. “Now the book’s worth what I priced it,” he steamed.”
― Evan Friss, The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore

“and many hours wrapping books. (They didn’t put books in bags back then.)”
― Evan Friss, The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore

“Books hold ideas. Ideas hold power.”
― Evan Friss, The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore