Introduction

When we enter bookshops, we engage in a social and spatial act on the threshold of commerce and culture, one that activates material, aesthetic, political, personal, and communal affiliations and commitments. Through this act, we stake claims on the place of art and reading in a capitalist economy, we shape the towns and cities in which we would like to live, and we connect our private literate reflection to public consumption and exchange. The interests of commerce and culture, however, are not easily reconciled, and bookshops have long operated within the fraught space formed in these twinned and competing forces. They are charged social spaces that open up the field of cultural production in ways that are both intimate and expansive. As Jean-Luc Nancy writes, the bookshop ‘opens to the reader the general space of all kinds of opening’. ¹ The opening of a door leads to the opening of books and the opening of ideas. The opening of the physical space of ideas leads to the opening of communities and to the opening of the communication that sustains a literary culture.