Shelf Life

A writer working in a bookstore, as Suzanne Strempek Shea sees it, is a spy of sorts. "Not unlike a farmer hanging around the dairy section. A fashion designer lurking in the boutique. ... The quarterback hiding in the backseat during the fan's ride home," she writes in her new memoir, Shelf Life: Romance, Mystery, Drama, and Other Page-turning Adventures from a Year in a Bookstore. Strempek Shea's spy territory is Edwards Bookstore in downtown Springfield. Several days a week, for the past several years, she's left her home in Palmer and her work as a writer (a career that's included four well-received novels; the memoir Songs from a Lead-lined Room, about being diagnosed and then treated for breast cancer; and a New England Book Award for Fiction) and headed to her job at Edwards, where she stocks shelves and rings up purchases and plans author-readings -- and sees, first-hand, what happens when book and reader first meet. And Strempek Shea is not above making sure readers meet her books particularly. She gamely admits to shameless self-promotion of her own books -- relocating them to prime spots on the shelves, sticking them in the cardboard displays that stand near the front of the store. "I have passed customers with one of my books in hand and have said to them, 'I heard that's quite good,'" Strempek Shea writes. "Most have nodded, smiled. One informed me, 'Doesn't look it.'" And when shoppers come in looking for mindless beach reads, the writer in her cringes. "Because when you lead them to your opinion of a book they'll read that morning and forget by lunch," she writes, "you hope that somewhere in some bookstore at the very same moment, a clerk is not leading a similar customer to one of your titles and saying, as you are announcing now, 'Pick any of these. Trust me. If you remember a single thing from this story, you can have your money back.'" There's a generosity of spirit in Strempek Shea's writing, and in her approach to customer service -- even when that customer is buying something from a treacly yet popular line of greeting cards called Blue Mountain. "As a bookstore employee, I'm not supposed to judge choices of reading material, and neither should I go jabbing customers about their selections of greeting cards," she writes. "I should squelch the 'You're really buying this?' and take their $3.75 plus tax and give them a bag and smile. Because people who buy Blue Mountain -- especially people who buy Blue Mountain-- have feelings. Scripty, swirly, Karo-syrupy feelings, maybe. But feelings nonetheless." So, too, does she hold her tongue when customers buy, for instance, th maudlin September 11-memorial books, or one of the endless self-help titles that pass through the shop. Strempek Shea's passion for books is not bound up in snobby notions of what's "worthy" of such adoration; no matter what kind of stories or information, fantasies or facts her customers are looking for, they want books, and that makes her happy. Working at a bookstore, she's noticed something she's never seen at other stores: When the clerk hands customers their purchases, they invariably hug their new book to their chests. Strempek Shea holds booksellers in the same esteem some people reserve for ballplayers and pop stars (and more should reserve for, say, nurses and good teachers). Her first love, the venerable Johnson's, for decades sat proudly on Springfield's Main Street before closing a few years ago. Trips to Johnson's were a treat for Strempek Shea as a child; as an adult, just out of college and working as a reporter at the Union-News, she'd head to Third National Bank to cash her paycheck, "much too much of which was spent next door at Johnson's Bookstore, which conveniently was connected to Third National by an inner door. That entrance should have been shaped like a funnel, because that's what it was for me." But the star of Shelf Life is Edwards, a small but vibrant shop that sits at the top of the escalator in Springfield's not-especially-vibrant Tower Square. Edwards is as unpretentious as its hometown, not too snobby to stock John Grisham or the various Venus and Mars offspring but also the place to head for Roddy Doyle or books on Native American culture. It's a second-generation family business, run by the big-hearted Janet Edwards, assisted by a small group of faithful helpers, including her elderly mom, Flo, whom some regulars call "Mother." Strempek Shea joined the Edwards family in 2001, when her friend Janet was looking for part-time help and Strempek Shea, just coming off her successful cancer treatment, was looking for the next phase of her life. "For many months you go through being cared for and checked on every day and then you're spat out into the world to resume your life," she writes. "Now what? you wonder. What's going to get me now? Or what should I be doing now so something won't get me? Or how should I be living now that I still have a chance to live?" She asked whether employees get a discount. They do, Edwards told her; 30 percent. Strempek Shea took the job, and thus began her life as a spy.