As I wandered through the virtual stacks of Harper's archive researching last week's column, I noticed that references to another corner of the book trade came up quite often--bookselling in all of its passionate, literate, insightful and perpetually endangered glory. So I decided to bookend those old publishing industry analyses with a few bookshop memories.

1. September 1892 Harper's observed that bookshops in cities and villages "used to be an intellectual centre where readers met, not only to keep the run of the thought of the world, but to exchange ideas about it. Few are so now. Bookshops generally throughout the country have changed their character. The booksellers say that it does not pay to keep a stock of standard literature, nor to put on their counters the pick of the best books that are published every week. Their book-stalls have become shops of 'notions,' of bric-a-brac, of games, of newspapers and periodicals, of the cheap and flimsy temporary product of commercially directed press, with only an occasional real book that has attained exceptional notoriety."

2. April 1937 I was surprised to discover that children's book sections, which are now a profitable bookstore staple, weren't always so. Writing about the Children's Spring Book Festival, May Lamberton Becker praised the quality of children's books, but she also bemoaned the fact that for much of the year, most people "would scarcely know that they are there. Where are they, indeed, in far too many of our bookshops all these long months between the first of January and the middle of September?

"I know where to look for them when I visit a typical shop of this kind. I go straight through to the back of the store. Under the stairs, there they are, the children's books, with the decorations left over from last Christmas tucked in with them, ready for next Christmas's display. Books for children, it would appear, are in such places considered solely as holiday gifts and expected to hibernate for the rest of the year."

3. July 1954 A gentleman named Siegfried Weisberger, who closed his bookshop in Baltimore after 29 years in the business, said the "age of the boob is upon us" because the country had entered an era when people want "bucks, not books."

Curious whether bookselling was a vanishing profession, Harper's surveyed publishers, booksellers and sales reps, discovering that the "pedigreed bookseller, the old ideal of the classical scholar and man of letters who sold books for the sheer joy of being among them has, to be sure, pretty largely disappeared. The modern bookseller is a book-lover too, albeit a practical one. He must look to his bookkeeping as well as his books. His costs are going up. His margin of survival is beset with books which should have been best sellers but which were something less than that. He likes to be among books, but he likes to be among customers more."

4. October 1965 Alan Levy, in his essay "Lost in the Bookshops of New York," wrote that the American bookseller "has been sounding his own death knell for more than half a century, while struggling to live with such cancerous growths as bicycles, automobiles, telephones, television, movies, department stores, coupon advertising, book clubs, Sunday supplements, magazines, Time-Life Books, paperbacks, Little Blue Books, Modern Library, public libraries, lending libraries, and remaindering."

He cited Brentano's retail strategy as an example of how booksellers were fighting back by meeting the threat of discounters like E.J. Korvette "with, among other weapons, a superb paperback palazzo in the main store (13,000 titles, arranged by category, not by publisher) and the creeping non-book merchandise upstairs (stuffed Kookie Gonk, $5; bust of John F. Kennedy, $50)."

5. August 1985 In a condensed version of a discussion held at the ABA convention in San Francisco, Hillel Stavis, owner of WordsWorth bookshop, Cambridge, Mass., disagreed with others on the panel that the book trade's mission was to give the public what it wants: "After all, bookstores should not serve merely as an afterword to whatever is happening in the general society; they are, or should be, an active and a positive force. Independently owned stores should resurrect the backlist titles not carried by the chains and support new titles from small presses. Although chains like B. Dalton do offer a wide selection, the general trend is toward blockbusters; and as the chains capture an increasing share of the market, their ever-narrowing selection will come to dictate what publishers publish. But in the long term, this narrowing selection will produce a non-reading public, which will be detrimental to both chains and independents."

What's past is prologue, indeed, Mr. Shakespeare.--Published in Shelf Awareness, issue #1092.