Advertisement for the Bookshop which ran in Queen's Quarterly magazine in 1968. Pictured are Fred Sargeant (l.) and Craig Rodwell (r.).
Late 1950s: Two unnamed booksellers chatting with a sales representative from Ballentine at the American Booksellers Association Annual Convention.
Interior of the March Community Book Shop in Harlem. Opened in 1948 by Aldrich Turner and Martin L. Fall. (photo courtesy of the Publisher’s Weekly Archives.)
One of the earliest mentions I can find of a Black-owned bookstore. The Greenville Times, Greenville, MS, May 16, 1901.
The search for minority bookstores & booksellers
If you looked at the home page photograph and thought, “that’s a lot of white faces!,” you are right. Women had been allowed in the room only eight years prior. That doesn’t mean there weren’t booksellers of color. Finding them just requires digging deeper into the historical record.
As a part of my research for the book, I have been documenting every instance I uncover of a minority-owned and operated bookstore. Below you will find a link to my list in progress. You can help! If you know of, or remember, one of these stores please email me.
In finding these stores and their stories, I aim to show that these stores, while under the radar of the mainstream bookselling community, were just as crucial and influential in the communities they served as their more well-known counterparts.
If you know of , or personally remember, a BIPOC or LGBTQ+ owned bookstore, I would love to hear about it! Please email me at info@bookstorechronicles.com
The Data
This list of minority-owned historical bookstores is a subset of a larger dataset I have been compiling for over three years. The goal is to eventually compile a database of every known historical bookstore from 1850 to the present. A database like this will yield important and interesting information about bookstores in America. How many woman-owned bookstores were there in 1880 versus 1900 versus 1920? What was the average time a bookstore stayed in business in the first half of the 20th century versus the last? We could create an interactive map showing the spread, rise, and fall of bookstores over time.
This is an ongoing project and as such, this data is far from complete. If you would like a copy of the most recent dataset, you can request one at iinfo@bookstorechronicles.com.
If you know of a bookstore that is not on this list, I would welcome your addition to the data. Please email info@bookstorechronicles.com.
