The Bookshop: A History of Bookselling from the Dawn of Print to the Twenty-First Century

by Andrew Pettegree

The global history of the rise and transformation of bookstores, from medieval book merchants to today’s neighborhood indies

Whether it’s a local indie bookshop, an online megaretailer, or a chain bookstore, the place we buy books is an essential part of our reading lives. Bookstores connect books to potential buyers and convert idle browsers into committed readers. Yet, as historian Andrew Pettegree reveals, it took more than five centuries after Gutenberg for bookstores as we know them to emerge.

The Bookshop tells a sweeping history of the bookstore. It celebrates the ingenuity of booksellers, from the smugglers who carried contraband books across borders, to the innovators who created the global distribution networks that define books and bookselling today. Even though few bookshops lasted more than a few years during the best of times, booksellers relentlessly sought new ways to get books to readers. Innovators like the squabbling dealers who invented the secondhand bookstore, or Victorian capitalists like W. H. Smith, who built an empire of railroad station book stalls to serve idle passengers, made bookselling what it is today.

The Bookshop is the story of how the bookstore became the indispensable meeting place for book makers and book lovers around the world.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Books About Books

261 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 17, 2026

About the author

I began my career working on aspects of the European Reformation. My first book was a study of religious refugee communities in the sixteenth century, and since then I have published on the Dutch Revolt, and on the Reformation in Germany, France and England, as well as a general survey history of the sixteenth century. In the last years the focus of my research has shifted towards an interest in the history of communication, and especially the history of the book. I run a research group that in 2011 completed a survey of all books published before1601: the Universal Short Title Catalogue. This work continues with work to incorporate new discoveries and continue the survey into the seventeenth century.

In 2010 I published an award-winning study of The Book in the Renaissance, and in 2014 The Invention of News: a study of the birth of a commercial culture of news publication in the four centuries between 1400 and 1800. I return to the Reformation for a study of Luther’s media strategy, published in 2015 by Penguin as Brand Luther, 1517, Printing and the Making of the Reformation. I am now engaged in a study of the book world of the seventeenth century Dutch Republic, to be published in 2019 as Trading Books in the Age of Rembrandt.

I am the lead editor of two monograph series: the St Andrews Studies in Reformation History, and The Library of the Written Word. In 2012-2015 I served a three year term as Vice-President of the Royal Historical Society.

I welcome enquiries from potential postgraduate students working on any aspect of the Reformation or Book History.

Reviews

[History Today]

Few commercial enterprises possess as much romance as the bookshop. From the teetering warrens of secondhand dealers to the sprawling floors of Foyles on Charing Cross Road, they are places of promise and serendipity. At Wigtown in Scotland, the Open Book lets visitors stay in the flat above the shop and run it for a week. What might normally be counted as employment is turned into a holiday that one pays for, and is popular enough to be booked out for three years in advance. Certainly, not many people fantasise about leaving their jobs to start up a branch of Tesco or Zara.

Andrew Pettegree’s new book undoes some of the romance to show the precarity and hard graft that has shadowed the industry over the last 600 years. As with many new technologies, the first century after the invention of print saw a litany of bankruptcies, as printers invested capital without yet having a model for selling and distributing copies in bulk. And even after it was more established, the book trade ‘float[ed] perilously on a submerged mountain of credit and debt’, as vulnerable to wider economic or political turmoil as any other business.

Read the rest of the review at https://www.historytoday.com/archive/...
Natasha Simonova writes on 18th-century literature.

[Kimberley Chandler · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a joy to read. The prologue, entitled “Mr Pepys Goes Shopping” sets the tone for the book. It is lighthearted, yet informative and above all, optimistic about the future of the printed word. It is also extensively researched with some very helpful footnotes which have provided an abundance of further reading (including more of his own books).

It was very well-structured, in two main parts. Part one, ‘A New Age of Knowledge’, covers the Classical world of scrolls to the printing presses of the Industrial Revolution, introducing one of my favourite words “incunabula” (early printed book, pre-1500).

Part 2: ‘Expanding Horizons’ investigates the survival of bookshops throughout two world wars (and more minor ones); politics; economic depression; censorship; the birth and struggle of chain and special-interest (including LGBTQ+) bookshops and the introduction of the internet, to the present day, as well as the potential impact of AI (I cringe at the thought).

Pettegree does not only focus on the UK, Europe and the USA. He travels to most continents throughout his investigation. It is also a very quotable book:
“Nobody is diminished by sharing a pleasure with a wider public, and the pleasure of book ownership will continue to be a joy that unites an international reading public well into the future.” And I hope he’s right.

Thank you NetGalley and Basic Books for this ARC. All views are my own.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This review originally published in Looking For a Good Book. Rated 4.5 of 5

I have always enjoyed bookstores. There is something about walking into a bookstore and looking at the shelves, seeing what catches your eye, and discovering a book you didn't know you wanted to read. (You know you've done this!) So a book about the history of bookselling sounded like something I would enjoy, and I'm thrilled that Andrew Pettegree's The Bookshop did not disappoint.

The Bookshop: A History of Bookselling From the Dawn of Print to the 21st Century takes a look at how books have been sold from the earliest days of printing through the bookstores we know today. What I found particularly interesting is that the modern bookstore, as we know it, is actually a fairly recent development. Who knew? For hundreds of years, books were sold in all sorts of ways and in all sorts of places, and booksellers had to continually find new ways to get books into the hands of readers.

Pettegree covers a lot of ground. There are stories of early booksellers, traveling sellers, secondhand books, books being sold in railway stations, specialty bookstores, chain stores, and eventually online bookselling. Some of these were businesses I would never have thought of as part of the history of the bookstore. I especially enjoyed seeing how some of the ideas that seem modern really aren't all that new. Booksellers have always been experimenting with different ways to reach customers.

One of the things I liked most about the book was learning about the business side of bookselling. As readers, we tend to think about the bookstore as a place where we go to find books, but there is a tremendous amount that has to happen behind the scenes to make that possible. Distribution, pricing, competition, changing technology, and the simple problem of keeping a bookstore in business have been challenges for booksellers for centuries.

The later chapters were especially interesting to me because they deal with things that are much more familiar. The growth of chain bookstores, the struggles and successes of independent bookstores, and the rise of online bookselling show just how much the business has changed in a relatively short period of time. Amazon, e-books, and the changing ways people discover and purchase books might seem like completely new problems, but Pettegree makes it clear that bookselling has always been an industry in the process of changing.

This is a history book, and there is a lot of information here. It isn't something I would necessarily recommend to someone who isn't interested in books or bookstores, but for someone who enjoys reading or has ever wondered how the bookstore became what it is today, there is a lot to enjoy. I found myself frequently stopping to think about how different buying a book must have been in the past and how much and how consistently bookselling has evolved. We think of the Amazon 'problem' as being new, but similar issues have faced booksellers ever since books existed.

This appealed to me for the obvious reason that I enjoy books, but I've also worked in three different bookstores (two chains [both mentioned in this book], and a local store) and a good friend currently owns and runs a second hand bookshop.

Looking for a good book? I really enjoyed The Bookshop by Andrew Pettegee. I learned a lot about the history of bookselling, but I also enjoyed the look at the more modern aspects of bookstores and the challenges they face today. It also gave me an even greater appreciation for the places where we buy our books. If you are a book lover (and if you're reading this review you most likely are), I think this is a book worth picking up.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Comprehensive (If European/ North American Focused) History. I read Pettegree's 2021 history of THE LIBRARY, and it was great. So when I saw this book hit NetGalley, I had to have it too. And honestly, Pettegree nails it yet again.

This text takes the entirety of the subject's history, from its earliest forms and places all the way through even the newest (at least circa 2025, when this text was being finished) AI threats and opportunities, and explains everything in sufficient detail as to be informative yet also sufficient clarity as to be understandable for nearly any reader. Where books covering this amount of information can come across as dense textbooks in some hands - including many of those similar to Pettegree writing books while employed as University professors - Pettegree, both in THE LIBRARY and here, is much more approachable. Not in a "joke that will be dated by the time the book publishes" way, simply in a very straight forward, no-nonsense "this happened, this is what caused it, this is what followed from it" kind of way.

Indeed the one thing I could find to fault at all here almost seems difficult to fathom given how very often a sentence seemed to end with a numbered footnote: the dearth of a bibliography, clocking in at just 10% of the advance review copy edition of the text I read. This is the singular reason for the star deduction, as I have come to expect at least 15% bibliography in my extensive reading of ARC nonfiction over these last eight years as a book blogger in particular.

One other more seeming minor issue is the focus on Europe and North America or their colonial influences, though given the paucity of available records Pettegree does mention at least a few times, it is at least possible that non-European-influenced book sales records simply do not exist. That would be a discussion and debate for Pettegree's colleagues in academia to debate over, as I have no real way of knowing as a "simple" book reviewer what the actual state of such records may or may not be.

Still, the fact that Pettegree covers all that he does - including the rise of the chain bookstores, their collapse back into a few even larger brands, the rise of Amazon and, later, AI, in addition to the pre-computer era history from the most ancient times through essentially today - at such detail in such a short amount of pages really is rather astounding, and truly a sight to behold.

Very much recommended.

[Krystelle (based on the novel by Stephen King) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC!

How lucky we are to live in a world with books, and how lucky we are to live in a world with bookshops to browse and ponder over. It’s truly lovely.

This book emphasises just how lovely it is, and goes through an extensive history of books and book selling, as well as collecting of books just for pure pleasure. It’s a fairly exhaustive history, and it does a good job of going into all the nooks and crannies of books as a whole.

I do think it could have done with a little more context as to some of the facets of history, including ancient times, but I’m conscious few records likely exist of those kinds of periods. I also appreciate there could have been a little more outside a Western focus, but aside from that, this is a solid treatise on the love of books for the sake of books.

[Tony · Rating 5 out of 5]

Usually, meta-discussion about “books” makes me wince. Tote-bag neologisms like “bookish” and “booktrovert,” and the insistent translation of the English “I love books” into the impressively Latin “bibliophile,” are reserved now for people who not only read, but who want you to think that they read. In their defense, in my experience at least, these people do really read books. But this description borders on the meaningless. Air and water are good, but bad air and bad water exist and should be avoided. As it is with air and water, so it is with literature.

Now you can understand my apprehension about starting Andrew Pettegree’s The Bookshop. Not having read Pettegree’s earlier output, I pictured anecdotes from blue-haired tattooed women about how the radical bookstores (which is American for bookshop) they worked at were safe spaces or something. I pictured jeremiads on book bans (which – in modern usage – means responsible custodial parents opposing public funds being spent on obscenity accessible to children). Naturally I pictured the obligatory Ludditesque rants about Amazon in general, and about Kindle in particular.

Fortunately, The Bookshop is a serious history of the printing, publishing, sale, and resale of books of all kinds. Its subtitle – a history of bookselling from the dawn of print to the 21st century – describes it better than its title. (This is no fault of the author’s, but of modern publishers’ fixation on titles of one word followed by subtitles of one paragraph.) Pettegree teaches us that a disproportionate part of the history of book sales was done by wandering salesmen, initially lone wolves who bought stock from publishers and wholesales and hit the road with barrows full of books and pamphlets, then centralized corps of trained hawkers working for publishing houses.

As a detached historian of communication, Pettegree confronts modern skepticism about the effects of new technology on the sales and consumption of books. Today’s readers “benefit hugely from the larger range of the modern chain stores, the larger independent stores and, of course, the possibility of shopping online for both new and second-hand books.” In my case, the effect of Amazon – which owns Abebooks, Bookfinder, and Goodreads – on my reading has been almost entirely to the good. This is not the end of the story, as the effects of AI on publishing are slowly showing themselves, and they seem bad.

What surprised me is how new is our idea of the bookstore. Selling books and only books in a standalone location, Pettegree informs us, really only took off in the nineteenth century. Before that, books were sold next to anything from cloth to oats, especially in rural areas. Pettegree: “In the decades before the First World War, it is estimated that 90 per cent of the books sold were not purchased in bookstores. It rather puts our own present anxieties about the decline of the physical bookshop into context.” Purposefully or not, browsing was discouraged, as the buyer would tell the seller what he wanted and it would be retrieved for him. For most of the history of printing, texts were prohibitively expensive. Before Gutenberg, they were copied by hand, and even for centuries afterward few motions were made to sell low-cost books. With these social and financial obstacles in the way, the reading working class really did settle for a family Bible and not much else.

That began to change in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with the advent of a fascinating institution, now extinct. Private lending libraries rented expensive hardcovers to their members for pennies per day. This is irresistibly similar to the video rental stores that cropped up not long after VHS beat Betamax. In 1984 and 1985, for example, Disney’s Robin Hood and Pinocchio retailed for $80, which is around $240 in today’s money. Even in 1986, when Disney reduced most releases to $30, that would have required nearly $90 in today’s purchasing power. These prices practically created Blockbuster. Robert Southey’s punchy 1809 quip that “they who buy books do not read them, and they who read them do not buy them,” may lack universal truth but does explain the proliferation and popularity of lending libraries.

The target on the back of the private lending library was the low-cost paperback, the history of which Pettegree details nicely. They started as literally pocket-sized volumes of fewer than 50 pages and contained what we might now call trash: cheesy westerns, romances, and detective stories of doubtful literary merit. The genius of it was where they were sold: railway stations. They were the perfect thing to while away a long train journey, then toss when you were done (so your spouse didn’t see it). When Allen Lane’s Penguin in 1935 brought the inexpensive, compact format to works of celebrated literature, the private lending library lost its reason for existing and died.

Pettegree’s research is full of surprises to the modern reader. The illustrated dust jacket took off in the years between the first and second world wars, for instance, and so is only about a hundred years old. Then there is Anne Frank’s diary. It almost went unpublished after several Dutch publishing houses rejected it. Even when it was published, sales were slow. Pettegree attributes its fame to the 1952 American edition that featured a preface from Eleanor Roosevelt.

The last two chapters fly by. They are, first, a history of chain bookstores – of which, incredibly, the United States once had sixteen – and gentle advice to calm down (“Apocalypse Not Yet”) about the future of bookstores. It is true that Amazon controls over 50 percent of the new book market in the United States and Europe, but the predicted disappearance of physical books, breathlessly predicted (and wished for by Jeff Bezos) when the first Kindle was released, never materialized. “Here we are, almost thirty years later, and physical books still command more than 80 per cent of the marketplace. In the past years sales of e-readers have stalled. The survival of the physical book, a functionally defunct technology, is not just a gesture of nostalgic obstinacy. It is also a rejection of the digital alternatives.” Books in physical and digital form have never been so accessible to so many. Pettegree is persuasively sanguine about the future of books, and so am I.

[KRISTEN CONNELL]

The Bookshop: A History of Bookselling From the Dawn of Print to the 21st Century is an irresistible history for anyone who has ever wandered into a bookshop and felt that they had entered a world larger than the street outside. Andrew Pettegree takes an institution that can seem timeless and reveals how remarkably restless, entrepreneurial, unpredictable, and sometimes illicit its history has actually been.

The book’s greatest strength is its refusal to treat bookselling as merely the commercial space between publishers and readers. Instead, Pettegree places booksellers at the center of cultural and social change, tracing the evolution of the trade from the earliest days of print through collectors’ shops, street hawkers, underground and illicit markets, feminist bookshops, powerful retail chains, and the transformation brought about by online selling.

That sweeping chronology gives The Bookshop an appeal far beyond conventional publishing history. The stories of individual booksellers and shops become windows into larger questions about who gets access to ideas, how reading communities form, how cultural movements find physical spaces, and how technology continually reshapes the relationship between books and their readers.

There is something particularly timely about a book that looks backward while asking readers to consider what the bookselling experience might become next. As independent bookstores continue to occupy a complicated position alongside enormous chains and digital retailers, understanding how bookselling has repeatedly adapted and sometimes reinvented itself makes this history feel immediately relevant.

Pettegree’s previous work on libraries and books gives the subject an especially strong foundation, but The Bookshop ultimately succeeds because it understands that the history of bookselling is really a history of people: collectors, entrepreneurs, activists, readers, sellers, and communities gathering around the physical book.

For readers who love books, bookstores, publishing, cultural history, or the stories behind how ideas travel, this is precisely the kind of history that can turn an everyday institution into something newly fascinating.

[heptagrammaton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pettegree's history steps beyond the threshold of the bookshop—indeed, then and now, plenty of book trade takes place on foot, via intercontinental mail, on street stalls and in pop-up kiosks, at fairs on next to grocery aisles, and between criminal conspiracies of oligopolist antiquarians at estate actions. The bookshop, an ever economically precarious institution, was long in the making.
   And on the way to tracing that you get to learn plenty about post-print intellectual culture, and its material makeup—

   

Governmental bodies, particularly in urban context, were much more concerned with policing the spoken word than print. A pamphlet could be confiscated or destroyed, its printer or author punished. But once a song was on the wind, there was little that could be done to prevent its dissemination, other than to sit tight and hope that some other appealing target for ridicule would come along soon.

   This book changes, as bookselling did, after the proliferation of rail. It grows denser, its stories change in scale: now involving chains with hundreds of locations and mergers—but, also, as it grows near to the present, more spread out and local: Pettegree does most of hist mentions of places outside of Western Europe and East Coast US here, granular enough to mention a single shop in Somerset or Prague, or invite reminiscences or recommendations from Pettegree himself. This is not a bad shift, per se, but it does come with some stylistic drawbacks (take a shot every time the word 'bookish' is mentioned, and, for your own health, don't read more than ten pages at once) and somewhat sloppy summarizations of decades-spanning economic and cultural history.

____
This review was based off a digital advanced review copy, provided by Basic Books through NetGalley.

[Adam‘’s book reviews · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bookshop by Andrew Pettegree is a detailed history of bookselling from the earliest book trade to the modern bookstore, covering the people, businesses, technology, transportation, and regulations that shaped how books reached readers.

I found the subject fascinating and learned a lot, particularly about the many ways books were sold before the modern bookstore. I was also surprised by how much of the book focuses on censorship and the efforts of governments and religious institutions to control what people could publish, sell, and read. That became one of the most interesting themes for me.

My biggest issue was the amount of detail. There are countless dates, names, publishers, and booksellers, and similar developments are often explained separately for different countries. I kept wishing the author would step back and focus on the bigger picture instead of repeating the same history with different examples. I also felt that revisiting topics from earlier chapters made the book feel slow and repetitive.

Overall, I liked the subject more than I liked the reading experience. The book is well researched and informative, but I would have found it much more engaging if it had been tighter and focused more on the bigger story.

Thanks to NetGalley and Basic Books for providing an advance copy.

[Sharon Greenwood · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you Basic Books, US for the advanced reader copy.

This very comprehensive history offers a sweeping journey through the world of bookselling, and it is certainly not a light read. Andrew Pettegree has produced a work that is incredibly well-researched and full of facts and dates, reflecting his deep expertise in the evolution of the trade. From the cramped stalls of the 17th century to the modern digital era, the narrative is consistently well-written, balancing dense historical detail with a clear, authoritative voice.

The experience is further enhanced by the inclusion of beautiful images that bring these lost worlds of ink and paper to life. Because of its depth and scholarly rigor, this volume is a must for any bibliophile looking to understand the roots of their passion. Ultimately, it is a definitive reference work and a must for your home library, serving as a lasting tribute to the shops that have shaped our intellectual history.

Recommended Read for Bibliophiles: While the sheer volume of information might be daunting for casual readers, it is an essential, beautifully produced record of how we buy and share books.

[Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was pleased to be asked to review this really interesting book via NetGalley.

As a lover of books, bookshops, history of books this was right up my street.

Divided up imto two distinct sections :-

Part one: ‘A New Age of Knowledge’ - which covers printing presses, industrial revolution, scrolls etc and gives the reader a well researched insight

Part two: Expanding Horizons investigates the survival of bookshops throughout two World Wars, this agiain was interesting as I have enjoyed reading about the history of the Penguin book, the shortage of paper and more of the public either buying books or borrowing form lending libraries. He explores the advent of LGBTQ+ book shops, the internet and how we access books more and more digitally ( although I do like a physical book sometimes). This is so up to date as the author explore AI and the potential (not so good for authors and the dificulty of being able to essentially tell the difference).

For book lovers delve into the history you may well learn a lot as I did

Published yesterday - October 13 2026 - will make someone happy this Christmas over the long holidays.

[Michael C · Rating 4 out of 5]

A survey of the history of bookselling, with the emphasis on the English-speaking world, and to a lesser extent, Western Europe, and with no coverage of the Islamic world and very little on Asia, Africa and South America. Within those limitations, the book is full of interesting information. For me, the best sections were on bookselling in early modern Europe - partly because I was much more familiar with the trade's more recent history. I felt the period from the end of World War Two was given disproportionate attention, and I would have preferred the author not to have intruded his own personal experiences, but other readers may well take a different view.

Recommended to anyone interested in the history of books.

With thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for letting me have an advance copy. The opinions in this review are entirely my own.

[Lydia Wagner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the advanced copy of The Bookshop. A thorough compendium on the history of book selling and bookshops. Learned a lot and found it accessible.

I think it may ultimately be more interesting on audio as this type of nonfiction typically is for me, but glad I picked this up as an avid reader and would recommend.

[Susie Dumond · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a bookseller and lover of literary history, this was a fascinating read! Pettegree's long view of the bookselling industry actually makes looking at the issues we face today a little less scary. (At least we probably won't get sent to the guillotine for selling banned books!) It's a bit dry at times, but folks who love books will have a good time.

[Debbie · Rating 5 out of 5]

fantastic read… a journey through the development of books from the beginning to now. Loved it - beautifully written with lots of interesting details. International focus. Highly recommended. Also love the advice that bookshops should have a section labelled ‘books about books’. Thank you to the author. Thank you to # NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC.

[Jessica Hembree · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Novel-readers are like opium smokers: The more they have of it, the more they want of it."
I love to learn and I love books, so when the opportunity arose for me to read this book prior to its publication through NetGalley, I was very interested. There were so many things that I did not know about publication and distribution of books prior to reading this book. Very interesting and informative. The quote included above was my favorite and really stood out to me.

[Chantal Agapiti · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m an indie author and founder of The Dreamer’s Bookshop which is a small indie bookshop based in Belgium.
That’s why I requested this book, as I was interested by what I could learn from it.

The author did a great job going into detail, depicting specific times and hurdles from the book industry.
It was interesting to see how the country where I live used to play a big role in the past, yet today it’s a lone star
in a galaxy of surrounding planets.

The evolution through time from print, paperbacks, the influence of railways, and of course the two great wars.
All had major impacts on the making of books and how to sell them. Yet the physical book endured, and is still present today.

No matter the technological advantages, even in distopian movies we’ll see people keeping books as a tresor of lost things.
In the end the book represents a promise of traveling to another place, without the need to go anywhere.
It offers solace and comfort, an escape in tough times. Holding it in your hands, smelling it, holding it near is an experience.
A human experience we can all live despite our monetary resources, books don’t exclude anyone. They’re for all, and forever.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for granting me this opportunity.

[Heather Parish · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having spent a decade in publishing and a decade in libraries, I was fascinated to read about a part of the book trade I knew little about. Pettegree’s book walked me through not just the history of bookselling but the complex changes in the economics and the anthropology of books and their readers.

The language is kept pretty simple, but the narrative isn’t exactly propulsive. But if the reader has an interest in the topic, that won’t be an issue. Books are so intricately and ubiquitously woven throughout our lives and culture, much of what I learned here was eye-opening and enjoyable to read.

Thank you to NetGalley and Basic Books for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.