Andrew Pettegree: The Bookshop book review – Saucy stories
The academic and historian's epic history of books, bookshops and the printing trade is meticulously researched, occasionally racy and undeniably dense
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Remember when you used to nick your mum’s Jackie Collins novels and turn to the saucy bits when she was out shopping? I confess I did this, or a version of, with Andrew Pettegree’s new non-fiction title The Bookshop. Pettegree is an esteemed academic and historian, and this is a pioneering and meticulously researched history of not just bookshops (as we know and love them) but the 600-year evolution of print, publishing, booksellers, book culture and the social and political forces that have shaped the global industry.
This informative and at times entertaining tome is dense: you may have guessed. In sections where, as Pettegree makes plain, there are scant records, it swims with dates: rollcalls of American, Australian, European (you name it) printers, pamphleteers, publishers, booksellers and agents, with time-flips from medieval Florentines to railway-stand kingpin WH Smith to the dreaded Amazon, and back again.
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So yes, I skipped to the salacious chapters; to 16th-century Spanish ‘chivalric’ lit (bonkbusters), the society-rocking scandal of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and, more brutally, censorship as a tool of totalitarian regimes (a stark reminder in neo-fascist times). Pettegree’s command of his sprawling subject is clear. Comprising two parts (part one covering the first four centuries of the handpress era), it is encyclopedic, an essential resource for anyone interested in the largely undocumented and precarious history of bookselling.
There are some standout anecdotes, especially in later chapters where improved records supply much-needed colour. But it is no page-turner. Every scrap of research makes the cut and it lacks the narrative tentacles of truly readable non-fiction. Good news for booklovers, though. According to Pettegree, print (and by dint, bookshops) are not dead: you read it here first.
Andrew Pettegree: The Bookshop – A History Of Bookselling From The Dawn Of Print To The 21st Century is published by Profile Books on Thursday 17 September.