Reading, Wanting, and Broken Economics

Simon R. Frost

Description

Combining historical study, theorization, and experimental fiction, this book takes commodity culture and book retail around 1900 as the prime example of a market of symbolic goods. With the port of Southampton, England, as his case study, Simon R. Frost reveals how the city's bookshops, with their combinations of libraries, haberdashery, stationery, and books, sustained and were sustained by the dreams of ordinary readers, and how together they created the values powering this market. The goods in this market were symbolic and were not "consumed" but read. Their readings were created between other readers and texts, in happy disobedience to the neoliberal laws of the free market. Today such reader-created social markets comprise much of the world's branded economies, which is why Frost calls for a new understanding of both literary and market values.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Their or, Rather, Our Books

Part I: Theory, Methods, Tactics, and Politics

1. Reading and Wanting: Commodity Culture Needs Readers

2. Book Retail: A Test Bed for Sustainable Economics

3. Je Suis the Unknown Public

4. When Books Come to Town: International Aspirations, High Street-Bound

Part II: Southampton Stories

5. What's Selling in Southampton: Commodity Culture, Dock Strikes, and Gas-and-Water Socialism

6. The Daily Round

7. High Street Southampton Bookshops

8. Gilbert's: A Treetop in the Networked Forest

Part III: Factual Fictions

9. Five Visits to Gilbert's

Part IV: Theory, Methods, Tactics, and Politics, 2.0

10. Reading Entertainment and the Construction of Economic Reality

11. Events, Frames, and History: Getting What We Want from a Book

12. Whose Is the Question Économique?

Conclusion

Appendix: Biblioteca: Toward a Bibliography of Works Published by H.M. Gilbert and Sons

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Royaume-Uni
• Great Britain
• History of Europe
• United Kingdom
• Economic history
• Reino Unido

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 mai 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438483535
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 11 Mo

Extrait

Praise for Reading, Wanting, and Broken Economics
“This stimulating study of bookshops as ‘insatiable’ sites of openly participatory reading is an arresting departure from literary-critical perspectives, focusing instead on books as material, commodified, and contested objects of economic exchange. It is a compelling contribution to the contentious conceptualization of literature as a traded commodity, and one securely grounded in—and also provocatively reinterpreting and theoretically reconstructing—the rich historical resources of a globally-connected port city.”
— James Raven FBA, author of What is the History of the Book?
“Simon Frost’s study prompts book history to look both backwards and forwards. Its detailed study of the book trade in Southampton around 1900 recalls the Annales School, where fine-grained investigation of a single locale serves as a microcosm of a larger reality. But in its rethinking of the relationship between economics and literature, it pushes book history forwards—taking readers’ desires seriously and asking how commerce and reading might be mutually constitutive. Impressively interdisciplinary, methodologically innovative, and engaged with the most recent critical theory, Reading, Wanting, and Broken Economics charts new ways to think about reading and its multiple payoffs.”
— Simone Murray, Monash University
“ Reading, Wanting, and Broken Economics provides a robust argument for fuller political economies of reading. In this impressive work, Simon Frost skillfully locates his case study within a richly nuanced historical, political, networked cultural, and economic landscape, which results in an intellectual—and, often entertaining—illustration of how we can study twenty-first-century readers within a commodity culture. This work is an exemplary illustration of the necessity to study historical and contemporary readers through an interdisciplinary lens. Our goal should be to do it as well as Frost does.”
— DeNel Rehberg Sedo, Mount Saint Vincent University
READING, WANTING, AND BROKEN ECONOMICS
SUNY series in the History of Books, Publishing, and the Book Trades

Ann R. Hawkins, Sean C. Grass, E. Leigh Bonds, editors
READING, WANTING, AND BROKEN ECONOMICS
A Twenty-First-Century Study of Readers and Bookshops in Southampton around 1900
SIMON R. FROST
Cover image: Gilbert’s bookshop. Photographed by T.H. James, ca. 1895. Southhampton Museums, Cultural Services.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2021 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Frost, Simon R., author.
Title: Reading, wanting, and broken economics : a twenty-first-century study of readers and bookshops in Southampton around 1900 / Simon Frost.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2021] | Series: SUNY series in the history of books, publishing, and the book trades | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020031594 | ISBN 9781438483511 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438483535 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Booksellers and bookselling—Economic aspects—England—Southampton—History—20th century. | Bookstores—England—Southampton—History—20th century. | Books and reading—England—Southampton—History—20th century. | Books and reading—Economic aspects—England—Southampton—History—20th century.
Classification: LCC Z330.6.S66 F76 2021 | DDC 381/.4500209422760904—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020031594
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Louie, your relentless humanity insisted on this: save a seat for us, love—Kingsland 28/R, 702–3.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Their or, Rather, Our Books
PART ONE
Theory, Methods, Tactics, and Politics
Chapter 1 Reading and Wanting: Commodity Culture Needs Readers
Chapter 2 Book Retail: A Test Bed for Sustainable Economics
Chapter 3 Je Suis the Unknown Public
Chapter 4 When Books Come to Town: International Aspirations, High Street-Bound
PART TWO
Southampton Stories
Chapter 5 What’s Selling in Southampton: Commodity Culture, Dock Strikes, and Gas-and-Water Socialism
Chapter 6 The Daily Round
Chapter 7 High Street Southampton Bookshops
Chapter 8 Gilbert’s: A Treetop in the Networked Forest
PART THREE
Factual Fictions
Chapter 9 Five Visits to Gilbert’s
PART FOUR
Theory, Methods, Tactics, and Politics, 2.0
Chapter 10 Reading Entertainment and the Construction of Economic Reality
Chapter 11 Events, Frames, and History: Getting What We Want from a Book
Chapter 12 Whose Is the Question Économique ?
Conclusion
Appendix: Biblioteca: Toward a Bibliography of Works Published by H.M. Gilbert and Sons
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Illustrations and Tables
Figures
5.1 The site of Southampton’s first public library, St. Mary’s Hall, photographed before 1936.
6.1 Facsimile of a proposed window show card, from The Successful Bookseller , 1906.
7.1 Advertisement for bookseller Robert Batt, Southampton Annual , 1902.
7.2 Southampton High Street, Below Bar, showing on the left the bookshop of Robert Batt, after 1900.
7.3 Topographical Publishing Company, in Pembroke Square, 1899.
7.4 Advertisement for a range of services from George Buxey, 1895.
7.5 Thomas James’s secondhand bookshop, photographed by his son, Thomas Hibberd James, after 1886.
7.6 View of Gilbert’s bookshop, 26 1/2 High Street, Above Bar, photographed by T. H. James, ca. 1895.
7.7 The all-round book business of John Adams, 1899.
7.8 Advertisement for Lankester and Crook, selling everything from a circulating library service to ironmongery.
7.9 Lankester and Crook, County Supply Stores, Obelisk Road, Woolston, ca. 1896.
8.1 “Ye Olde Booke Shoppe,” a carefully directed advertisement for bookseller Henry March Gilbert, 1896.
8.2 Typographic insistence: advertisement for Gilbert’s, from Bernard Street days, in Hampshire Advertiser , 1873.
8.3 Henry March Gilbert, seated, left.
9.1 Gilbert’s bookshop.
Maps
7.1 Southampton bookstores, 1876.
7.2 Southampton bookstores, 1887.
7.3 Southampton bookstores, 1897.
7.4 Southampton bookstores, 1900–1901.
7.5 Southampton bookstores, 1905–1907.
Tables
8.1 Gilbert’s circulating library charges.
8.2 Gilbert’s circulating library charges.
10.1 Four transactions and their following gains.
10.2 Four yeild-positions and their results.
Acknowledgments
This research was intended to be a modest investigation of book retail but was derailed—or, rather, developed in unforeseen ways—in 2014 by a grant from the Bournemouth University Fusion Fund, which enabled a nationwide UK survey of reader expectations. It also allowed me to undertake case-study research with the international bookselling chain John Smith’s, part of the JS Group, to whose management, shop managers and employees I am extremely grateful for allowing me access to their operations. The combined experience of this and of the impact of relentless post-crash austerity throughout the 2010s called for a reframing of the entire project, and expansion of scope. Such re-framing has also meant that material in chapter 2 , “ Je Suis the Unknown Public,” has been taken and reworked from an earlier publication, “Reconsidering the Unknown Public: A Puzzle of Literary Gains,” in Studies in Victorian and Modern Literature: A Tribute to John Sutherland , edited by William Baker (Lanham, Maryland: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, Rowman and Littlefield Publishing Group, 2015), 3–15, to whom I would like to express my gratitude for permission. For permissions, too, I would like to express thanks to the Southampton City Library, to Southampton City Archives and to Southampton Local and Maritime collections for use of several images, and to Joanne Smith in particular for invaluable assistance throughout; as well as thanks to the Bitterne Local History Society for providing such effective resources. For insights into retail book trade, thanks are due to Richard Gilbert, to the late and much-missed Emeritus Professor Iain Stevenson, and very much so to a dear friend, Sharon Murray, manager to several chain outlets, including Blackwells, Broad Street, Oxford, and Foyles, Charing Cross, London.
For invaluable criticism and for forcing me to think through various conceptual problems I could barely articulate, I would like to thank John Frow, and I would like to thank eminent economist Ha-Joon Chang for not reacting to my work as though it were a comedy. Of educators, scholars and editors who, despite my inability to stay proportionate, remained steadfast in their patient guidan