ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the queerness of modernist independent bookshops before they could be unproblematically understood in such terms. After with an opening discussion of bookshops as modern queer spaces, the chapter provides a case study of Charles Lahr’s Progressive Bookshop in interwar London. It closes with an analysis of Rhys Davies’s “Wigs, Costumes, Masks,” a short story by one of the Progressive Bookshop’s most faithful customers. Davies’s story dwells on the same threshold between public commerce and private desire that one finds in the queer bookshop, ultimately providing a vivid example of the incoherent queerness of modern(ist) London.
