Whether it’s a local indie bookshop, an online mega-retailer or a chain bookstore, the place we buy books is an essential part of our reading lives. Bookstores connect books to potential buyers and convert idle browsers into committed readers. Yet, as historian Andrew Pettegree reveals, it took more than five centuries after Gutenberg for bookstores as we know them to emerge. THE BOOKSHOP tells a sweeping history of the bookstore. It celebrates the ingenuity of booksellers, from the smugglers who carried contraband books across borders, to the innovators who created the global distribution networks that define books and bookselling today.