When did bookshops start sorting their books by category? Does anyone know? Or have any theories? Did they model themselves on libraries?
All my life they’ve been sorted that way. Some of the categories (manga) are newer than others (literature) but I don’t remember ever seeing a book shop without sections. Does anyone remember a time when they weren’t organised that way?
And when were the very first bookshops? I know libraries have been around since forever but bookshops haven’t.
I’m thinking of Jane Austen and not remembering a single bookshop and yet her characters have books. Were they from libraries? Or did they own them? And if they did where did they buy them? At a general store?
I don’t think I was alive when the first bookshops came out, but I do know that they had to buy them somewhere because I read a book that was published in the 1850’s (Uncle Tom’s Cabin) so yeah they probalby bought them in a general store or something..You’d probably hate the book ’cause they go through the book tallkin’ li’ dis’ with a bunch of apostraphies and southern accent because it was a slave book from the south but I can understand it because I live in the south..or most of it anyway.
In From Cover To Cover by Horning she said that the Half Title page dates back to a time when books were sold unbound and it served to protect the pages stacking in the bookshop. She doesn’t give dates, but I remember hearing this before.
found this. It’s got stuff about how people started buying books.
I thought this line was morbidly amusing-
“At that time even the purchase or possession of an unlicensed book was a punishable offense. The idea that owning a certain book is against the law is ludicrous, while at the same time, it doesn’t seem entirely impossible anymore, unfortunately. kinda scary. and 1984ish.
There is lots of pushing going on (and equal amounts of resisting) for libraries to start organising by category, instead of Dewey. After all, who knows that gardening is found at 635, or YA fiction at 823.4?
Librarians do. But not anyone else. Like the people who, say, might be in a library. looking for a book about gardening. or ya fiction.
yeah I remember learing about the dewey decimal system and i could find a book in the library by it but i don’t know what the numbers mean..i prefer categorized but thats just because i’m a lazy teen hehe
samuel pepys mentions visits to booksellers several times in his diary, so they must have been fairly commonplace in 17th C. London, at least.
oh, and i suspect jane austen’s characters mostly bought their books from booksellers in london or other major cities, or ordered them from same.
Fanny price dares to join a subscription library in Mansfield Park, when she gets to Portsmouth.
My understanding is that there were booksellers, but also lending libraries, where one could go to change books. (Fanny brings home plenty of books to begin her sister susan’s education, and they read as they sew upstairs.)
subscriptions could be raised to print books–many writers sought patrons to pay, and printed effusive dedications up front in thanks–but subscriptions would do the same. It was a lot like people pitching in money to get the book into print, and from there would be demand. Advances were rotten then, royalties stinted, etc.
Then there was grub street, where writers were paid minimally to turn out stuff for readers–everything from fake travelogues (when those were in fashion) to porn to novels to histories.
There’s an entertaining book out about grub street, the context revolutionary printing, that can resonate with writers now.
You could buy books in shops in the Middle Ages, but it was like buying upmarket cars -a very big deal. There were also shops where you bought the parchment and inks and stuff to make books. Or you could commission them. In London the shops were near St Pauls. Justine, if ever yu’re in Canebrra give me a hoy and I’ll show you reproductions of books from the later Middle Ages so you can get a feel for how it operated. The boks most certainly weren’t classified by genre in teh shops – we’re talking expensive items. The few pictures we ahve show well-dressed people examining single voumes with great care.
In Paris you could hire bits of boks (uni texts) and copy them for your course then return them and hire the next bit.
Bookshops as we know them happened after printing. Not too long after printing, either.
Sorry about my typing – I’m having an interesting day.
Ooh, I actually sort of graduated on this subject way back when! And I don’t remember a thing, except that my thesisy thing was on a publisher/bookseller who pirated (!) an English translation of a (rather naughty) Dutch book in 1682 (!), when there was a pretty large industry of publishers/booksellers in London. In the order of they had a whole street to themselves.
In Holland we also had ambulatory booksellers, who carried books around to the smaller cities and villages. I should really get out my journals on this subject again, it’s a quite fascinating field…
Oh, and my library recently started displaying novels by genre. I hate it. Just as I hate self-checkout and self-checkin. I want my librarians back!
There were definitely bookshops in Austen’s time: Hatchards for example was founded in 1797. The circulating libraries were pretty popular, where people paid a small fee to borrow books.
The libraries before the end of the 19th century were subscription circulating libraries. Not public. You paid a fee to be a member.
too lazy to write a long answer, will tell you more next time i see you if you’re still curious. yes, circulating libraries v. popular in austen’s day (and basically on this model you have a couple ‘tickets,’ as the english library system still seemed to work based on what i saw my grandmother doing, that would let you ‘rent’ x number of volumes–there are some funny lines about this in sheridan’s ‘the rivals’ also). both provincial and london booksellers, of course, though big readers probably ordered directly from london in the 17th and 18th centuries. the neighborhood esp assocated with booksellers in that period in london is st. paul’s churchyard, there was a host of small shops (and obviously also less clear delineation for the most part between printers, publishers and booksellers). But you can glean quite a lot of information even from title pages of those old books, including (often) the name of the printer as well as the bookshop you could buy the book at & where it was located.
The history I think you’d want to consult is James Raven’s just-about-forthcoming The Business of Books…
http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=0300122616
As a former library page, I still have a fondness for old Dewey. When you think about it, Dewey *IS* categories; it’s just that the titles of the categories are numbers, not words. And don’t most libraries post listings of what the various centuries mean? They do here (where ‘here’ = Toronto, Canada).
well, there are modern bookstores still in operation that have been so since the 1740’s – and they certainly weren’t the first bookstores ever.
the wikipedia article on bookselling is quite interesting (to a bookseller, anyway) – and dates the first bookshops to the ancient roman times (someone had to keep Plato and that lot in scrolls!)
as far as categories — well, they must have existed back then, too. i mean, how else would you arrange them? color of ink?
my library system (maricopa county library district) will be opening a branch in a few months that will not use dewey at all. we’ve arranged the shelving to look like a bookstore and the books will be shelved by subject/category. the idea is to make the library more user-friendly rather than librarian-friendly. it’s causing a bit of a stir with the old guard.
The Moravian Book Shop in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, claims to be the world’s oldest bookseller, established 1745. I suppose next time I stop in, I could ask them if they have records of when they started organizing by category.
there were three main ways to get books back then: buy them, which most people couldn’t afford to do, either by mail order from a bookstore in a large city (pre-amazon), or by going to town; subscribe to a local circulating library, which were all private and mostly run by and for ladies for the purpose of reading novels; or borrow from someone else.
the last option was a very common cultural thing–people were supposed to share books with their friends, and one of the services a squire/gentleman provided to the neighborhood was access to his private library/personal collection, which should have been the work of many generations of collectors.
Austen herself, in fact, usually characterized the men in her books by their willingness/unwillingness to offer her heroines access to their libraries; by the use they made of their own libraries; by whether or not they expanded their libraries, etc.
oh my god. do i always sound that pedantic?
my library organizes by a strange mix of dewey and genre–young adult books are in one place, biographies are in another place, adult novels, etc. it’s sort of hard to find anything.
Thanks everyone for all the excellent bookshop responses. I’m never going to research anything myself again. I’ll just ask you lot.
Though you’re not satisfying me on the categories question. I guess I’ll find out if I read that book Jenny recommended . . .
Have you been into Foyle’s Books in London Justine? I don’t know how they shelve things now but the first time I went there they were still shelving by publisher–yep, by publisher. Evidently most bookshops used to do it that way. It made me wonder if the publishers ever had reps who shelved & displayed books in bookstores. As for the category thing I suspect that they started shelving by subject when the number of books available became great enough that categories were useful. Massive bookstores really are a modern phenomenon. Now that’s a good reason to be living now rather than then.
Anon