Novels Set in Bookshops and Libraries

The best novels set in bookshops and libraries use the shelves as more than scenery. A bookshop is a business that tends to lose money, a library is a memory that can burn, and both are full of strangers’ minds. Here are twelve books, from a horse-drawn bookshop of 1917 to a library between life and death in 2020, with what each one does with its setting.

Two of them, by Christopher Morley, are old enough to be in the public domain, so I quote them. The rest are modern, and I describe them instead.

The early novels set in bookshops: Christopher Morley

Parnassus on Wheels, Christopher Morley (1917)

Morley’s first novel, published by Doubleday, Page & Company, is narrated by Helen McGill, a 39-year-old farm housekeeper. She buys a travelling bookshop, a horse-drawn wagon “shaped like a van”, from its owner, Roger Mifflin, partly to stop her brother buying it. It is a comic road novel, and Mifflin gets the speeches:

“Lord!” he said, “when you sell a man a book you don’t sell him just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue–you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night–there’s all heaven and earth in a book, a real book I mean.

Christopher Morley, Parnassus on Wheels (1917), chapter four

Mifflin is half bookseller, half preacher, and Helen’s dry narration keeps him from becoming a bore. The “twelve ounces” is a salesman’s touch: he knows exactly what a book weighs.

The Haunted Bookshop, Christopher Morley (1919)

The 1919 sequel settles Mifflin in a second-hand shop in Brooklyn and turns the book into a mystery set in the world of books. It opens with one of the best first sentences in the genre:

If you are ever in Brooklyn, that borough of superb sunsets and magnificent vistas of husband-propelled baby-carriages, it is to be hoped you may chance upon a quiet by-street where there is a very remarkable bookshop.

Christopher Morley, The Haunted Bookshop (1919), chapter I

There are no actual ghosts. Mifflin explains the shop’s name later:

That’s why I call this place the Haunted Bookshop. Haunted by the ghosts of the books I haven’t read. Poor uneasy spirits, they walk and walk around me. There’s only one way to lay the ghost of a book, and that is to read it.

Christopher Morley, The Haunted Bookshop, chapter VI

Every reader with a to-be-read pile will recognise that haunting.

Bookshops and libraries in the twentieth century

Keep the Aspidistra Flying, George Orwell (1936)

Gordon Comstock gives up a promising job as an advertising copywriter to defy the money-god, and ends up in a bedsit, working in a small London bookshop owned by a Scot named McKechnie. Orwell knew the trade. In 1934 he had been working part-time at Booklovers’ Corner, a second-hand bookshop in Hampstead, and he wrote about it in his 1936 essay “Bookshop Memories”. This is the bitter book on the list. The shop is Gordon’s punishment, not his refuge.

The Library of Babel, Jorge Luis Borges (1941)

A story rather than a novel, but no list of fictional libraries is complete without it. First published in Spanish in 1941, it imagines a universe made of hexagonal rooms holding every possible 410-page book in a fixed set of characters. Borges was a librarian himself. The joke, and the horror, is that a library holding everything is useless, because the true books are lost among the nonsense.

84, Charing Cross Road, Helene Hanff (1970)

Not a novel, but it belongs here. Hanff’s book collects twenty years of letters between the author in New York and Frank Doel, chief buyer at Marks & Co., the antiquarian booksellers at that London address. It starts in 1949 with a request for books she could not find at home and becomes a friendship conducted entirely by post, food parcels included. Doel died in 1968, before she visited. The shop closed in December 1970.

The Bookshop, Penelope Fitzgerald (1978)

The best novel on this list. Shortlisted for the 1978 Booker Prize, it follows Florence Green, a widow who opens a bookshop in 1959 in Hardborough, a small Suffolk coastal town. Her premises are the damp, haunted Old House. The local grandee, Mrs Gamart, wants the building for an arts centre, and the town quietly closes ranks against Florence. Fitzgerald is funny and merciless about how communities decide who belongs. Isabel Coixet filmed it in 2017.

The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco (1980)

Eco’s debut novel is a murder mystery in an Italian abbey in 1327, and its centre is a labyrinthine library that the monks are forbidden to enter. The book everyone is dying over turns out to be the lost second part of Aristotle’s Poetics, on comedy. Its guardian, the blind monk Jorge of Burgos, regards laughter as a threat to God’s order. A library that exists to stop people reading is Eco’s great invention.

Recent novels set in bookshops and libraries

The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafón (2001)

Barcelona in the 1940s. Daniel, the son of a bookseller, is taken to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a secret library of rare and banned books, and chooses a novel by Julián Carax. He then discovers that a disfigured stranger has been hunting down and burning every other copy of Carax’s work. Lucia Graves’s 2004 English translation was a huge bestseller. It is lush and melodramatic, and it understands the bookseller’s dream of owning the only copy.

Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami (2002)

A fifteen-year-old runs away from Tokyo and takes refuge in the Komura Memorial Library in Takamatsu, a private library where he is befriended by Oshima at the front desk and meets the head of the library, Mrs. Saeki. In odd-numbered chapters the library is the one calm place in a novel in which an old man talks to cats and fish rain from the sky. Murakami makes it feel like the kind of library you find once in your life.

Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, Robin Sloan (2012)

A laid-off Silicon Valley tech worker takes the night shift at a San Francisco bookstore with almost no customers. He then finds that the dusty volumes are coded texts tied to a 500-year-old secret society. Sloan plays print against the internet without sneering at either. It is the cheerful book on this list, and the American hardcover’s glow-in-the-dark cover is a small joke about reading after hours.

The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry, Gabrielle Zevin (2014)

A grieving, reclusive bookseller on Alice Island has a rare edition of Tamerlane stolen, then finds a toddler left in his shop. Zevin’s novel reached number one on the National Indie Best Seller List in 2014. Unsurprisingly, independent booksellers loved a novel in which a bookshop saves a life. Zevin wrote the screenplay for the 2022 film herself.

The Midnight Library, Matt Haig (2020)

Nora Seed, at the lowest point of her life, wakes in a library between life and death, where every book is a version of her life that branched from a different choice. The librarian is Mrs Elm, who was kind to her at school. It takes the oldest metaphor in reading, that a book is a life you get to try on, and makes it literal.

The list at a glance

What these novels have in common

Nearly every bookseller here is losing money, and nearly every library is under threat. Florence Green is evicted, Eco’s library burns, and Carax’s books are hunted down. The setting is loved because it is fragile. The other pattern is that books get read aloud and passed on. In The Shadow of the Wind, Daniel visits the rare-book dealer’s blind niece, Clara, to read Carax to her. That is a very old way of sharing a book, and I trace it in a short history of reading aloud.

For the books’ own best lines on books, see quotes about reading, from the books themselves. For readers who leave traces in second-hand copies, see why readers write in books. And if this list makes you want a shop of your own, start smaller, with a personal collection worth keeping. Marks & Co. is long gone, but the building at 84 Charing Cross Road still stands, and Hanff did finally visit the empty shop in the summer of 1971.

Sources

• Christopher Morley, Parnassus on Wheels, Project Gutenberg #5311; Wikipedia: Parnassus on Wheels
• Christopher Morley, The Haunted Bookshop, Project Gutenberg #172; Wikipedia: The Haunted Bookshop
• Wikipedia: Keep the Aspidistra Flying
• Wikipedia: The Library of Babel
• Wikipedia: 84, Charing Cross Road
• Wikipedia: The Bookshop
• Wikipedia: The Name of the Rose
• Wikipedia: The Shadow of the Wind
• Wikipedia: Kafka on the Shore
• Wikipedia: Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore
• Wikipedia: Gabrielle Zevin; Wikipedia: The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry (film)
• Wikipedia: The Midnight Library