Shelf Life
Remember what it was like to enter your favorite independent bookstore: strolling the shelves of local authors, breathing in the scent of new and used paperbacks, filling your tote bag with hours of printed fun? Shelf Life is a monthly column where Rachel A.G. Gilman tries to recreate this feeling, chatting with owners about the history of their bookstores, how the pandemic has reshaped the bookselling business, and some of their favorite titles.
Bookseller Best Reads of 2021
To wrap up 2021, we touched base with every bookstore profiled to hear about what’s new, and to get their picks for the best thing they’ve read this year.
Literati Bookstore
Despite sounding too quaint to be true, Literati Bookstore is, indeed, a very real place, one named Publishers Weekly Bookstore of the Year in 2019. It was opened eight years ago by Michigan natives Mike and Hilary Gustafson, who, when hearing about the closure of Borders in Ann Arbor, wanted to make sure the city wasn’t without a downtown general bookstore.