Book Review: The Bookshop by Andrew Pettegree
Comprehensive (If European/ North American Focused) History. I read Pettegree's 2021 history of THE LIBRARY, and it was great. So when I saw this book hit NetGalley, I had to have it too. And honestly, Pettegree nails it yet again. This text takes the entirety of the subject's history, from its earliest forms and places all the way through even the newest (at least circa 2025, when this text was being finished) AI threats and opportunities, and explains everything in sufficient detail as to be informative yet also sufficient clarity as to be understandable for nearly any reader. Where books covering this amount of information can come across as dense textbooks in some hands - including many of those similar to Pettegree writing books while employed as University professors - Pettegree, both in THE LIBRARY and here, is much more approachable. Not in a "joke that will be dated by the time the book publishes" way, simply in a very straight forward, no-nonsense "this happened, this is what caused it, this is what followed from it" kind of way. Indeed the one thing I could find to fault at all here almost seems difficult to fathom given how very often a sentence seemed to end with a numbered footnote: the dearth of a bibliography, clocking in at just 10% of the advance review copy edition of the text I read. This is the singular reason for the star deduction, as I have come to expect at least 15% bibliography in my extensive reading of ARC nonfiction over these last eight years as a book blogger in particular. One other more seeming minor issue is the focus on Europe and North America or their colonial influences, though given the paucity of available records Pettegree does mention at least a few times, it is at least possible that non-European-influenced book sales records simply do not exist. That would be a discussion and debate for Pettegree's colleagues in academia to debate over, as I have no real way of knowing as a "simple" book reviewer what the actual state of such records may or may not be. Still, the fact that Pettegree covers all that he does - including the rise of the chain bookstores, their collapse back into a few even larger brands, the rise of Amazon and, later, AI, in addition to the pre-computer era history from the most ancient times through essentially today - at such detail in such a short amount of pages really is rather astounding, and truly a sight to behold. Very much recommended.This review of The Bookshop by Andrew Pettegree was originally written on October 10, 2026.
