Andrew Pettegree for The Bookshop: A History of Bookselling

Andrew Pettegree is coming to Topping & Company Booksellers on Friday 25 September, where he'll be talking about his new book, The Bookshop: A History of Bookselling. It's a global history of the trade rather than a history of bookshops themselves, and it covers a vast stretch of time: from the papyrus scroll sellers of ancient Rome through the cramped collectors' shops Samuel Pepys used to frequent, the radical feminist bookshops of the 1970s, the rise of the monolithic chains, and on to the world of online selling. Along the way, Pettegree focuses on the hard graft and the precarity of the trade over six centuries, and the role of the charismatic entrepreneur — a list that, he notes, contentiously includes Jeff Bezos.

Pettegree is a heavy hitter on this subject. He's Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews and a leading expert on the history of books and other media. He's written The Book at War and the prize-winning The Book in the Renaissance, and co-authored The Library: A Fragile History with Arthur der Weduwen. He was also a former Vice-President of the Royal Historical Society and the founding director of the Universal Short Title Catalogue, a collective catalogue of every book published in Europe and its overseas colonies between the invention of printing and 1700. If you've ever wondered how the business of selling books actually worked before the internet, he's one of the best people to ask.

The talk is at Topping & Company Booksellers, 1 Museum Street, York YO 7DT, on Friday 25 September. It starts at 7pm, with doors open from 6.30pm.