On Tuesday, March 25, 2014, I presented a talk entitled “Mapping the Bookstore in Nineteenth-Century New York City” at Columbia University’s wonderful Book History Colloquium.
See the announcement and upcoming talks here.
Here is the abstract of the talk, followed by my presentation slides (view on SlideShare here):
The romanticization of the independent bookstore—haven of booklovers, erudite employees, and serendipitous discovery—obscures the historical reality of selling books—rapid turnover, failure, and looming bottom lines. But bookstores are also more than the sum of their books. This talk examines bookstores in New York City from 1820 to 1860, mapping their locations and movements to trace the retail landscape of a growing bookselling center, and presenting select case studies of stores, including Appleton & Co., to explore how the physical spaces and marketing strategies of retail booksellers helped shape the very definition of a bookstore and the contours of literary culture more generally. An understudied component of book history, the retail bookstore presented books as mass market goods in the nineteenth century and participated in the lively and varied cultural life of antebellum New York City.
