Economic Imaginings of Consumption in Book Retail: from a Monumental Logic to a (Passing) Political Moment?

Abstract

Far from being a conventional trade in consumer goods, with price value estimated from a relationship between demand and scarcity, book retail is saturated in the politics of class, gender, and race. To thrive, it must be alive to the promises and pitfalls of those dimensions, especially as they are imagined through reading. Therefore, to understand book retail only through institutionalized models of neoclassical economics would be a mistake. A mistake not only because book retail trades in symbolic goods, which are goods of an inherently interpretive, political, all-too-human kind, but also because symbolic goods defy foundational categories such as ‘consumption’. From a historic case study, that of book retail in Southampton around 1900, it can be shown which forces have actively sustained the book business. Revealed, too, is how economics is merely the material mathematized wing of a particular cultural-political way of thinking, one that can be broken free from without losing either business or responsibilities to race, gender, and class.