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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2024-04-16 10:13 pm (UTC)That's sort of my thought. There were certainly bookstores before the late 19th Century - Hello, St. Paul's Churchyard - but the financial and social model when they are printed via formes set with movable type is emphatically not that of the modern-day bookstore where many middle-income buyers come in regularly to browse and pick up a new read. That's why Jane Austen's heroines use circulating libraries. (But Mr. Bennett, a gentleman with a respectable income and less popular tastes, buys his books ... probably from booksellers in London.)
Not having read the reviewed book, I am only guessing that it assumes a very mid-20th century model for the bookstore at a social level. Victoria Goddard's Greenwing and Dart series certainly does, in an otherwise Regency world, and it sets my teeth on edge.