Every now and then I find myself fantasising about opening a small independent bookshop. I suspect a few readers of this magazine have entertained similar daydreams. Handsome floor-to-ceiling shelves; creaking floorboards; general second-hand offerings, with occasional high-value first editions and antiquarian books; plenty of free time to thumb through stock as it comes in.

Then I got to know a few booksellers and realised what a headache the whole enterprise must be. I had appreciated the importance of constant selling but not, in my naivety, of constant buying. Stock must come from somewhere and for every book you sell you need to buy another to take its place. The booksellers I know are constantly on the road, bouncing between house clearances, the suspension on their beat-up Volvo Estates groaning under the weight. Many of them suffer not only the metaphorical headache of running a business with thin margins and thick overheads, but also chronic backache, having lugged too many densely packed boxes up too many flights of stairs.

Andrew Pettegree has obviously spent plenty of time speaking with booksellers, too, for his superb new history of the bookshop abounds with the kinds of logistical issues that a more romantic chronicler would never think to include: warehousing constraints, stock issues, capital investment, bad neighbours and so on. The Bookshop