The Staff Shelf: White Square Books
What are booksellers reading?
When we walk into a bookstore, the first place we go is the staff recommendation shelves—it’s how you get a quick sense of the personality of the store. The very best bookstores are merely a reflection of the eclectic, deeply felt opinions of the book-lovers who work there. As part of our Interview with a Bookstore, we asked the owner what’s on her shelf.
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SLIDESHOW: White Square Books Staff Shelf
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- EILEEN RECOMMENDS: Garzoni was an Italian Baroque painter who made a living doing portrait miniatures for her aristocratic patrons. But her favorite subjects were fruits, vegetables, and flowers (with bugs). She painted with tempera on vellum (no easy task). My mission for 2016 is to visit museums that own one or more of her surreal and gorgeous botanical paintings.
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- EILEEN RECOMMENDS: Benazir Bhutto inscribed her 1988 autobiography to Senator Claiborne Pell, who had worked to secure Bhutto’s release from prison in the early 1980’s. Given that she spent so much time in detention and under tight security, books signed by Bhutto are quite rare. Her lovely inscription to the intrepid, eccentric, and long-serving Rhode Island senator makes this a very special book.
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- EILEEN RECOMMENDS: Sylvia Beach has been my idol for many years (and this picture of her standing with James Joyce in front of Shakespeare & Company has hung prominently in the bookstore since we first opened). So it meant a great deal that when The Most Dangerous Book was published last summer, Kevin Birmingham agreed to travel nearly 200 round-trip miles from Cambridge for an author event at White Square. This mix of literary biography and cultural history offers still-relevant cautions about the peril of censorship and the hypocrisy of moral bullies.
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- EILEEN RECOMMENDS: My favorite piece of writing by William Trevor is The Hill Bachelors, one of a dozen stories in the collection of the same name. Paulie, the unmarried son of an Irish farmer, returns home to take care of his mother and the dying farm after his father’s death. Over the course of this 22-page story he loses his fiancé (“Jeez! What would I do on a farm?”) and becomes on of the many bachelor hidden among the hills of western Ireland. “Enduring, unchanging, the hills had waited for him, claiming one of their own.” Each time I read this story I discover new subtleties and feel more empathy. It’s masterful.
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