If you were in the mood for a good book and did not know where to begin looking, the store's answer was its staff picks — a rotating set of recommendations covering current releases, classic titles and undiscovered gems, as diverse in subject as the booksellers were eclectic in taste. The list was refreshed roughly every two months, in three streams: fiction, non-fiction and children's.
The individual booksellers are not named in this archive. They were private employees of a business that no longer exists. What is described here is the practice, which is the part worth keeping.
The shelf-talker
The physical form of a staff pick is the shelf-talker: a small card, usually hand-written, clipped to the shelf edge beneath the book. On the card is a short recommendation — three or four sentences at most — and a signature.
It is the single most effective piece of merchandising an independent bookshop has, and it beats every algorithmic recommendation system yet devised for a specific reason: it is a signed, accountable opinion from a person who is standing in the room. If the recommendation is bad, the customer comes back and says so. That feedback loop does not exist online, and it is why the cards are still hand-written in shops that could easily print them.
How the store did it
Several conventions made the Baker Books version work.
- Every pick carried a specialism. Alongside each recommendation the store noted what that bookseller's territory was — biography and popular culture, children's and young adult, history, cooking, science fiction. A reader could therefore calibrate: a thriller recommendation from the children's buyer means something different from one from the crime reader.
- The recommendations were personal, not descriptive. The cards did not summarise the plot. They said what the book did to the reader — that the staff had drawn lots for the last advance copy; that a novel was not entirely believable and worked anyway; that a book had been read twice in a fortnight.
- Children's picks were separated out and given equal weight with adult fiction, which is not universal practice and should be. Choosing a book for someone else's eight-year-old is the hardest recommendation a bookseller makes.
- The list rotated. Bi-monthly refreshes meant a regular customer saw new cards on every visit, and meant no bookseller had to defend the same pick for a year.
The other recommendation streams
Staff picks were one of four overlapping recommendation systems the store ran, and the distinctions between them were deliberate:
- Staff picks — current, rotating, individual, by section.
- The favourite-books lists — each bookseller's thirteen best books of the previous twelve years, refreshed rarely. A career list rather than a seasonal one.
- Customer recommendations — written by readers, edited lightly, and published under the store's editorial control.
- The Pick of the Literate — the standing subject bibliographies on local and regional interest, which changed slowly and were the store's most durable work.
The uncomfortable part
There is a failure mode in staff-pick programmes and it is worth naming, because the store visibly avoided it.
The easy version is for every card to be enthusiastic, every book to be wonderful, and the whole display to become undifferentiated praise — at which point a customer correctly stops reading the cards. A recommendation only carries information if the recommender is capable of not making it.
The Baker Books cards were noticeably willing to be qualified: a novel described as not entirely believable and worth reading anyway, a writer's style flagged as unconventional and possibly not for everyone, a book recommended specifically to the kind of reader who would like that sort of thing. Those hedges are what make the unhedged recommendations mean something, and they are the hardest thing to persuade a new bookseller to write.
Why it still matters
Booksellers' hand-selling remains the mechanism by which most literary fiction and nearly all small-press work reaches its readers. The trade knows this: the American Booksellers Association built its national bestseller and recommendation programmes around it, and the New England Independent Booksellers Association, of which Baker Books was a member, exists in large part to aggregate those recommendations regionally.
A shelf-talker is a small piece of card. It is also the last remaining place in retail where somebody puts their name to an opinion and stands next to it all week.