Shelf Life

Those of us who think bookstores and libraries are the two best places in the world will enjoy this book by Suzanne Strempek Shea about her year on the staff of Edwards Books. Still reeling and disconnected from the previous year of battling breast cancer, she needed a reason to get out of her pajamas and away for a while from the writer's solitude of her home. She was offered part-time work at a favorite bookstore in Springfield, Mass., and became part of the staff family. A former reporter for The Providence Journal and the Springfield Union-News, Shea brings a reporter's eye for detail to her work. She has published four novels and a memoir, Notes from a Lead-Lined Room, has another novel coming out very soon, and won the New England Book Award for Fiction in 2000.

Shelf Life is pleasant, amusing, and sometimes passionate. For her, working in a bookstore was like being a sugar freak in a candy store, she writes. One of the bonuses is being able to promote her own books -- how many authors get to set up a display of their own just-published novel (Around Again) where and as they want it? Another is feeling all-wise as she matches book and customer.

Shea rapidly learned that confidentiality in a bookstore is important. You don't make the careless remark that may embarrass a customer, or comment in any way about who buys what. She discusses the independent Denver bookstore that refused to release a customer's purchase record to police. The court recognized the public's right to buy books anonymously without government interference, and the store kept its records to itself. This is less tightly written than Shea's novels, with a few lists of what's available in a good bookstore and a lot of good anecdotes. The author recovered her health and her joie de vivre during the year spent at Edwards, and now, two years later and back to writing, she is still on the staff part-time. By the time I finished reading, I was ready to go hunt a bookstore job for myself.