Shelf Life

About ten years ago, a new bookstore was opening near my home. The company's job advertisements proclaimed that they were looking to hire book lovers who wanted to share their infatuation with others. I remember thinking, "Why can't libraries run ads like that?" Instead, our job listings seem to communicate that we care less about literacy than we do about computer literacy, and more about non-traditional media than about the written word. We carefully articulate the importance of excellent customer service skills, but leave unsaid anything about the value we place on our product. Shelf Life made me wonder what it would be like to hire someone whose livelihood truly depended on books, literacy, and a reading public.

Writer Suzanne Strempek Shea is such a person, an award-winning author of five fiction and non-fiction titles. Shea did not get a job in a library. She did the next best thing. She went to work at an independent bookstore. At the time, Shea was recovering from breast cancer and saw her part-time job as self-prescribed therapy. Happily, she shares with us what she learned and what she came to love about that work. Some of what Shea reveals will be familiar to anyone who has worked at the circulation or reference desk of a public library. Her opening pages describe what her customers want from her. She refers to those customers, without embarrassment, as "patrons."

This is what they want, she tells us: names for babies, used car prices, Richard Nixon paper dolls, tips for performing music on stage, drug contra-indications, alternatives to the typical smoothie, a guide to the chakra system, and her list goes on for several more paragraphs. Reference and circulation personnel take note: at the bookstore counter, Shea is more than a "faceless keyboard tapper." She is the "knowledge-brimming, mountaintop-dwelling goddess of wisdom!"

Supernatural powers are not actually required of bookstore personnel. However, Shea has noticed that the common ingredient shared by her favorite bookstores, other than good food, is the nice people who work in them. Staff members in the best bookstores greet customers with a "genuine hello," offer suggestions, and help them find what they are looking for. She concludes that the best staff are the folks who are bookstore customers when they aren't working behind the counter. Maybe that is why they delight in seeing smiling patrons hug their book selections so appreciatively to their chests.

Bookstores and libraries have a common interest in confidentiality. Librarians write impressive sounding policies on this subject. Many of us, on soapboxes, proudly declare confidentiality a fundamental professional responsibility. In contrast, Shea sees confidentiality in the bookstore environment as a mixture of doctor/patient privilege and plain, old-fashioned Ccourtesy. Bookstore people are simply too courteous to blab about what a customer might be reading. If you suspect, based on her love of reading and the pleasure she derives from the company of books and readers, that Shea had fallen under the influence of librarians at an early age, you would be correct. Librarians Mrs. Bigda and Mrs. Rehor helped young Suzanne find animal stories on their bookmobile. They wisely never restricted her to the bottom rows of shelves that held titles for younger readers like her. They let her borrow titles that interested her, no matter the reading level. Not surprisingly, Suzanne was an enthusiastic member of the summer reading club who treasured the colorful bookmarks she received. She is still proud that her mother was recruited as a bookmobile driver and hauled truckloads of wonderful stories from one stop to another. Sometimes, Suzanne helped straighten shelves, stamp due dates, and hand out those nifty bookmarks.

Suzanne Strempek Shea, however, is an author first. Her descriptions of book tours and book signings in bookstores are done with humor and self-deprecation. They are touching reminders that writers, too, are just human. Sometimes, like us, they fantasize. Shea, for example, recounts the excitement of seeing an overflow crowd lined up in front of the bookstore where she was scheduled to do a book signing. It was only when she reached the store that she realized that the crowd had formed, not for her, but for Keno, an electronic gambling game being sold for the first time that day at the bookstore. An author working in a bookstore cannot help but covet the plots, talents, and successes of the other authors whose works surround her and her books. The reader empathizes when Shea strategically relocates an empty book display to a valuable piece of retail real estate and fills it with her latest title!