David Emblidge on four famed American Bookstores

David Emblidge spent his childhood in Buffalo, New York and "on the sunny beaches of Ontario’s Lake Erie." After university he worked at the Associated Press as a reporter covering everything from the "disappearance of rural doctors to hog futures, and one murder."

Before entering the publishing trade as a second career he spent ten rewarding years as a professor following on degrees in English (Univ. of Virginia) and American Studies (Univ. of Minnesota).  

He worked in publishing for nearly twenty-five years – as acquisitions editor, book packager, publishing consultant, editor in chief, and publisher. The houses: Harvard University Press, Cambridge University Press, Continuum, The Mountaineers Books. He founded Berkshire House Publishers (travel, regional literature and history, food), and  eventually sold it to WW Norton. As a book packager, he produced multi-volume series on various subjects for major trade book publishers such as St. Martins, Watson-Guptil, and Stackpole.

He currently holds a tenured position at Emerson College, in Boston in the Dept. of Writing, Literature and Publishing.  We met at his offices there to discuss the histories of four iconic American bookstores: Boston's Old Corner Bookstore, Manhattan's Scribner's Bookstore and Gotham Book Mart, and San Francisco's City Lights. Along the way we meet Ticknor & Fields, Emerson, Thoreau and Hawthorne; Frances Steloff and T.S. Eliot; and on the West Coast, Lawrence Monsanto Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg. Join us for the ride.