Bookselling as Resistance (BRN 2025)

James Barry (1819 – 1906) was a miller, fiddler, and printer in the tiny settlement of Six Mile Brook, Nova Scotia. Barry read widely, and in 1874, at the age of 55, he built a printing press, bought some type, and began printing. His extant library of 350 volumes at the Public Archives of Nova Scotia contains at least ten books that he typeset and printed – all of them illegally. The books...

Critical narratives of the 19th-century American book trade traditionally focus on the rise of the urban big-house publisher and emphasize a clustered network of large book firms fueled by the camaraderie and ambition of exceptional white men. And while it is true that the rise of the American publishing house was a pivotal moment in bookselling, these narratives elide the hundreds of smaller...

Few people have heard of Irene Babbidge today, but her achievements for booksellers were nothing short of extraordinary. In the Restrictive Practices Court’s examination of the Net Book Agreement in 1962 she was called as a witness and has been described as “brilliantly lucid” and “the most forceful and telling” representative for the Publishers Association and the Booksellers Association at...

In the interwar period, the book-minded Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), believed that political change could only happen if workers read the right books. State-performed censorship was limited in peacetime and an increasing number of left-leaning books and were published, thanks to innovators such as Victor Gollancz, Ernest Wishart or Allen Lane. However, politically and economically...

This paper examines two London bookshops of the 1960s, Indica and Better Books, and examines how they operated as what Kimberley Kinder describes as ‘counterspace(s) for social movements’ (Kinder, The Radical Bookstore, 2021). Both functioned as key venues for the radical counterculture of the 1960s, which resisted the Cold War agenda and supported various political causes such as the...

The left-wing movement in the Federal Republic of Germany from the late 1960s onwards was closely linked to the book trade and had a major influence on it, as well as on the publishing landscape and the dissemination of critical literature. The protest movement led to the proliferation of alternative and left-wing publishing houses. Classics of critical theory, Marxist writings and socially...

Print book piracy is widespread in India and, according to a recent Nielsen Bookscan survey, is worth an estimated US$39.90 million. This value is a quarter of the recorded sales of trade books in the country (US$159.60 million). Pirated books are sold and bought through a variety of formal channels including e-retailers like Amazon and Flipkart, brick-and-mortar stores, and informal...

For decades, Old Delhi's Daryaganj Sunday Book Bazaar was a vibrant marketplace for second-hand and pirated books, deeply embedded in the city's cultural and economic fabric. In July 2019, however, the bazaar was declared an ‘encroachment’ and removed from its historic location, sparking a legal and regulatory battle. Civic authorities relocated the bazaar to a new, ‘sanitised’ site, raising...

Abstract

This paper will analyse the circumstances and implications of the 1989 publication of Sharir ki Jankari (The Knowledge of the Body) by the feminist publishing house Kali for Women and a group of 75 women from villages in Rajasthan, India, who served collectively as authors, distributors, and sellers for the title. These author-booksellers visualized Sharir ki Jankari as a...

Twenty-first century bookselling is overshadowed by the market dominance of platform behemoths, and this is nowhere clearer than in the case of digital audiobooks, where Amazon’s Audible alone is estimated to hold nearly two-thirds of the US market share (Allen, 2023). As a result, such platforms exert significant commercial and intellectual control over audiobooks’ circulation, often to the...

In 2023, over sixty books were published in the Welsh Language: novels, memoirs, educational material, children's books, and poetry. They were distributed across Wales through a network of over 100 bookshops covering the 8000 square miles of the Welsh nation, serving its three million inhabitants. 26% can read Welsh and 27% can speak it. Over 26% of Welsh inhabitants read Welsh and 27% speak...

The radical book fair, with prominent examples run in Atlanta, Leipzig, Derry and London, is a space where trade publishing meets politics. It provides opportunities for connection and organising, learning and discussion, while also being a retail space. This paper presents a history and future outlook of Edinburgh’s radical book fair.

First organised in 1996 by Word Power Books, the fair...

From the early 1980s, feminist and gay bookstore Giovanni’s Room in Philadelphia, PA, sold books to London’s Gay’s The Word bookshop, enabling eagerly awaited US-published LGBTQ+ titles to enter the UK market. Ed Hermance, owner of Giovanni’s Room, notes in a letter to Gay’s The Word’s managers on 12 September 1983, ‘how important GTW is in our little enterprise’. But importing LGBTQ+...

The city of Berlin boasts a great number and diversity of bookstores specializing in languages other than German. These booksellers carry texts across borders despite additional costs and logistical constraints and thus contribute to the cultural diversity of the city. What motivates them to go to great lengths to make books in their various languages available? Why do some booksellers even...

Books serve as conduits for anxieties about a wide range of social issues. In recent years we have seen this particularly in relation to titles which contain – or are perceived to contain – LGBTQ+ subject matter for younger audiences. Paradoxically, at a time when representation for young queer people in literature has never been stronger, access to it is under sustained attack. In this paper...

There has perhaps been no bigger recent innovation in independent bookselling than the proliferation of romance-only bookstores that have sprung up in Anglophone locations, from Los Angeles to Edinburgh. Other bookstores, sometimes begrudgingly, as in the case of New York City’s Strand Book Store, have had to expand and make more prominent romance shelving. The big chains, purveyors of the...

Over the past decade, the international book community has watched with distress how increased political, ideological and religious polarisation has led to different types of book censorship being imposed around the world, as well as an increase in the cases of vandalism and aggressive and anti-social behaviour directed towards bookshops and booksellers. In response, the European and...