Rise of the Modernist Bookshop

Huw Osborne is Associate Professor of English at the Royal Military College of Canada.

• 'We have come to stay': the Hampshire bookshop and the 20th-century 'personal bookshop'. The Sunwise turn and the social space of the bookshop. Frank Shay's Greenwich Village: reconstructing the bookshop at 4 Christopher Street, 1920-1925. 'Lady Midwest': Fanny Butcher - books. 'A place known to the world as Devonshire Street': Modernism, commercialism, and the poetry bookshop. Counter-space in Charles Lahr's progressive bookshop. The Grolier poetry book shop: from couch to cultural icon. Sylvia & Company. Coda.

'Informed by impressive archival work, the essays in this collection all demonstrate that the roles played by independent bookstores extend well beyond that of middleman and are, in fact, those of active producers of literary texts and literary culture. Scholars and students of print culture, modernist literature, book history, and even periodical studies, will find this volume compelling and important.' Mark S. Morrisson, The Pennsylvania State University, USA 'This brilliant collection of essays pioneers research into one of the most neglected, but important, institutions of modernism: the bookshop. The fascinating essays here reveal the full significance of the bookshop as a space for disseminating modernism and show how bookshops, from New York to Paris, were often caught between the demands of commerce and culture. This stimulating book should be read by all those interested in understanding the relationship between modernism and its readership.' Andrew Thacker, Nottingham Trent University, UK