My daughter and I were the only browsers in a small bookstore when a woman entered to ask how to find a nearby donut shop. “So I’m in the wrong place altogether,” she replied to the bookseller’s instructions. “Unless you’d like to buy a book,” said the bookseller. The woman laughed and left. Bookselling is tough; that’s nothing new. In Riceyman Steps, a 1923 novel, the proprietor of the eponymous bookstore and his wife die of impoverishment and immiseration. In The Private Papers of a Bankrupt Bookseller, a 1931 novel presented as a memoir, the destitute bibliophile gases himself. As novels, they present a dark fantasy of bookselling; and, maybe unsurprisingly, both are British. The bookstore in the American imagination—established in part by Christopher Morley’s The Haunted Bookshop (1919), where customers receive bibliotherapy amid the lamplit labyrinth of a “warm and comfortable obscurity”—is a happier place. As scholars Kristen Doyle Highland and Eben Muse have demonstrated, ours is a fantasy of homey nooks where contingency and serendipity rule, outside the dictates of worldly time.
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