retailing

     bibliographies

Among bibliographies we recommend Robin Myers' The British Book Trade From Caxton to the Present Day: A Bibliographical Guide (London, Deutsch 73).

     profiles

Art book publisher and retailer Zwemmer was lovingly and definitively described in Nigel Vaux Halliday's More Than A Bookshop: Zwemmer's & Art in the 20th Century (Philip Wilson, London 1991). His detailed study draws on previously unexploited archival material in building a portrait of what was a benchmark among bookshops.

Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare & Company (Uni of Nebraska Press, Lincoln 1991) is a modest and elegant history, by its owner, of the famous Paris bookshop. 

It is complemented by The Very Rich Hours of Adrienne Monnier (Millington, London 1976), Richard McDougall's translation of the memoirs and essays of Beach's rival Adrienne Monnier.

Books & Co, the landmark New York bookshop established with part of the IBM fortune, is described in Bookstore: The Life & Times of Jeannette Watson and Books & Co (Harcourt Brace, New York 1999) by Lynne Tillman.

Terry Maher Against My Better Judgement: Adventures in the City & the Book Trade (Sinclair Stevenson, London 1994) is an account of the fall of the UK Pentos/Dillons empire. Retail chains B Dalton and Waldenbooks (now part of the Walmart behemoth) have yet to feature in readily-accessible general studies. Blackwell's site features a corporate history.

Robert Spector's Amazon.com: Get Big Fast (New York, Harper 00) is the best of the books about the online retailer.

     Australia

We have yet to encounter good studies of Mary Martin's, Margarita Webber's or Hall's, among other Australian bookshops that shaped this nation's cultural life.

John Holroyd's George Robertson of Melbourne 1825-1898 (Melbourne, Robertson & Mullens 68) and Ian McLaren's Henry Tolman Dwight: Bookseller & Publisher (Parkville, Melbourne Uni Library 89) cover the Victorian scene.


     next page  (reading)