Shelf Life: Chronicles of a Cairo Bookseller
By Nadia Wassef
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021

“Show me a bookseller,” said wise old Boston grandee Charles Eliot Goodspeed, founder of Goodspeed’s Book Shop back in the 19th century, “and I will show you a man who has seen the best and worst that humanity has to offer.” (His son George would sometimes add, “Yes, and he’s often embodied both,” but we needn’t dwell on that). This heightened nature of the endeavor is doubtless connected to the fact that books are different from anything else you can buy in a store - compact but infinite, mass-produced commodities that are intensely personal. This is probably why, as has been noted for four centuries, people act in odd ways when they’re in bookshops. 

Nadia Wassef, her sister Hind, and their friend Nihal voluntarily faced all of that oddity - the best and the worst that humanity has to offer - when they opened the first Diwan bookstore in Zamaled in 2002. Diwan was clean, brightly-lit, well-stocked, and professionally run along the lines of Western retail chains like Waterstones and Barnes & Noble. The place was the first of its kind in Egypt, and the idea was a success: soon Diwan stores were opening all over the country, promoting authors, hosting reading events, and, in a very real sense, introducing the concept of the modern “super-store” to the Egyptian reading public.

Wassef has dozens of sharp anecdotes about that reading public’s learning curve. In the chain’s early days, customers would sometimes become irate at the very notion that they would need to pay for books (full retail prices, in fact) rather than just borrow them. There were numerous complaints about the selection and particularly the prices. And inevitably, Wassef and her colleagues had to face the endemic sexism of traditional Egyptian society. Customers would assume Wassef was a part-time worker and ask her imperiously to go get the man who runs the shop - and those same customers would bridle in disbelief when told that she was not only the person running the shop but the person who owned the shop. 

She likewise had to deal with the endless red tape of dealing with the government. “If bribery was a skill,” she writes, “the handling of government bureaucrats was an art form.” She presents one grimly hilarious story about a bureaucrat quizzing her intently about a title whose title raises suspicions of impropriety. “At the Censorship Bureau, we have our finger on the pulse of the entire country. We know the trends before they happen.” The book? Jamie Oliver’s The Naked Chef.

Starting and running Diwan taught Wassef and her friends many lessons they couldn’t learn anywhere else, and also reinforced lessons Wassef records from the rest of her life as a wife and mother. This accounts for the occasional philosophical digression in the course of the book:

Control is the one addiction I have spent a lifetime trying to quit. I’ve been deluded into thinking that I can control anything, including my desire to control everything. The truth: most things that we care about are outside of our control. Deal with it. I have. I am.

Shelf Life is a heartfelt, biting, and often quite funny story of some of the best and worst that humanity has to offer. It’s the autobiography of a quiet, bookish revolution - one that’s ongoing.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.