In today’s episode, we’re discussing The Paris Bookseller, Kerri Maher’s captivating historical novel about Sylvia Beach, Shakespeare and Company, and literary life in 1920s Paris. Beach’s English-language bookshop became a gathering place for expat writers like Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ezra Pound—and published one of the most important (and most banned) books of the 20th century: James Joyce’s Ulysses. We’ll talk about what the novel gets right, where literary fiction meets bookshop reality, and how day-to-day shop life—then and now—is often less glamorously wine-soaked and more physically exhausting than one might wish.
Brattlecast #136 - So Many Subsets
In the second episode in our series on how the shop works, we’re talking about specificity. Before the Brattle can buy a group of books, we have to figure out what they are. Sounds simple, right? But often, the person calling us is not the person who collected the books, and they’re not sure what they have. We’ll ask, ‘What kind of books are they?’ and they’ll reply, ‘Fiction and non-fiction’ or ‘Hardcovers and paperbacks.’ Even if we can narrow it down to, say, books on food, that could mean thousands of different things, from fast food pamphlets to the first cookbook published in America (American Cookery). Learn how we narrow it down, and what makes a library desirable in general, on this laser-focused #brattlecast.
Brattlecast #119 - 20,000 Books!
Just another day at the Brattle: Ken gets called out to a house to look at “about 500” books, but when he arrives he finds three floors and a basement crammed with mysteries and sports biographies; some rooms are so full he can’t even get into them. Unusually for a house like this, the books are in perfect condition; a dust jacket cover has been applied to each one, and many of them are even signed by their authors. At the end of the day it ends up being more than 20,000 books. Ken and his team are still working on getting this massive library moved to the shop; it will take them literally years to sell them all. Learn about the logistics of a book-buy this big, and about the surprising connection between the real estate market and the secondhand book trade, on today’s episode.