Andrew Pettegree is a professor of modern history at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, specializing in the history of books and communication. His latest book, The Bookshop: A History of Bookselling from the Dawn of Print to the Twenty-First Century (Basic Books, Oct.), is an "expansive survey of the bookselling industry" that emphasizes the trade's "long history of adaptability" and "robustly hopeful outlook," per PW's review.

Pettegree talked with PW about the dawn of the first bookstores, the important role booksellers have always played in the publishing industry, and why books will ultimately prevail despite 150 years of handwringing about the inevitable demise of print.

What inspired you to write this comprehensive history of bookstores?

I've written on the history of libraries, a history of the transition from manuscripts to print, and a book on books in wartime. It was increasingly clear to me that we know an awful lot about printers and publishers, and a fair deal about authors and readers, but the humble tradesman responsible for connecting the production side with the reception side seems to have been ignored.

What were the first bookstores in Europe like?

The bookshop, as we know it, took a long time to emerge from a much more chaotic means of distribution of books in the first centuries of print. In the first 200 years, as many books were sold outdoors as were sold inside shops, which often were these lean-tos against churches or public buildings. They were fairly permanent, but also extremely cold and very small. Thus, a lot of our expectations of what a bookshop is were not met in these centuries.

Today, we expect a display window; we expect books to have lovely illustrated covers; and we expect there to be a clear differentiation between new bookshops, second-hand bookshops, and antiquarian bookshops. We expect a lot of people going in, and everybody being welcome. That certainly was not the case. We expect a mix of fiction and nonfiction. That certainly was not the case. It's only in the 18th century that fiction became a very significant part of the book world.

Why do you address the itinerant booksellers of yore in your book, when technically these wanderers were not bookstores?

Itinerant bookselling was very important in the first centuries of print. It was a very good way of ensuring that books moved through the various social strata, as, in the 17th and 18th centuries, bookshops were quite intimidating spaces: they would expect only professional people and people of wealth to be their customers.

Why does the scope of this history include the U.S. as well as Europe? Why not just focus on Europe?

It's impossible to write a history of bookselling without bringing the U.S. into it. It's such an important publishing power from the 19th century onwards. It's also an interesting story in itself, because the story of American bookselling is very much feast and famine. You could go to New York City in the 1930s and browse your way through hundreds of books, hundreds of bookshops, but apparently, two-thirds of counties in the U.S. didn't have a bookshop. There’d be a few books in general stores—schoolbooks, spelling books, DIY books of one sort or another. Bookselling was very much concentrated in the major cities.

There wasn't the same network which was developing in places like France and England at the same time. But of course, the U.S. was a country of innovation. There were the dime novels, and the use of newsagents or newsstands to get them out there, as well as the railways, which were absolutely essential to shifting the dial on the book market.

Was there anything that surprised you during your research for The Bookshop?

At the end of the 19th century, American publishers were seriously contemplating sidelining booksellers altogether: they would sell directly to their customers, either through newsstands or through the mail. But there are other periods when the booksellers had the upper hand. In the 17th century, for instance, booksellers in the Netherlands unilaterally introduced the right to return books that hadn't sold, which of course publishers didn't like at all. But publishers needed the booksellers.

Another thing that surprised me was the extent to which censorship impacted printers and authors more than it did booksellers in different parts of Europe. There were attempts to get booksellers to make catalogs of all their stock so that they could be checked to see that they weren’t selling anything offensive to the Catholic Church or to the Protestant churches. But people didn't take a great deal of notice of that because it wasn't all that hard: if you had a few illicit books, just tuck them away under a table or between other books.

You sound an optimistic note regarding the future of bookselling, and even include some positive words about Amazon’s impact. Do you consider that print books, and thus brick-and-mortar bookselling, will prevail in the digital age, now evolving into the AI age?

I've seen the death of the book predicted so often. I recently read a history of the bicycle, which came into fashion in the 1880s, 1890s. There were some who genuinely thought this would be the end of reading, because the people who could buy a bicycle were precisely those who would normally read books. Then the car came along, and the radio, and the cinema, and the television, and the CD-ROM—all of them were going to kill the physical book. Now there’s the internet and the Kindle, and it still hasn’t happened. Then there’s the audiobook.

There is something about the tactile experience of reading which is still very important to people. Also, I follow the figures quite carefully, and for every independent bookshop that closes, another one opens. After a period of crisis, the number of independent bookshops remains pretty stable in the U.K., and I imagine also in the U.S.

But this is not just about the U.S. and the U.K. Think of Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia. They're passionate about books in those countries. They have many more bookshops than we do because until 1989, they were living in a sort of sealed monastery where they could not choose where they would go, what they would buy. The freedoms that have come since the Iron Curtain was pulled down have made them very enthusiastic for books. That's why I wanted to make The Bookshop as much as possible a global history—to recognize the different experiences that people had of books and bookstores at different times and in different places.