In 2023, children's book author and bookseller Katie Clapham (The Tour at School) launched a feature on her Substack called "Receipt from the Bookshop," wherein she recounted bits from her day in the bookstore she co-owns with her mother in St. Annes-on-Sea, U.K. A few years and thousands of followers later, she has gathered some of the best of those dispatches into a book, aptly named Receipts from the Bookshop.
The wild success of these informal notes, written on the fly, is wholly due to Clapham's wry humor and descriptive skill. She turns even insignificant tasks like receiving the day's delivery or powering on the credit card reader into genuinely laugh-out-loud moments. Sometimes, it's merely something overheard on the street or a simple observation, such as the time a man used their shop window to readjust his trousers, "including undoing his entire belt and refastening it, presumably forgetting that glass is, in fact, see-through."
Clapham offers much more than a giggle, however, as she reminds readers that "buying a book from a bookshop really is an act of resistance" and celebrates every purchase, no matter how small. "Every day is another triumph against the vision of the town without us; a gap in the shelf of our high street. After all," she explains, "a town without a bookshop is a tragedy." Whether extolling the virtues of picture books or lamenting how many of the books on order are actually for her, Clapham's enthusiasm for reading is vibrant, authentic, and contagious, a bulwark against despair in challenging times. --Sara Beth West, freelance reviewer and librarian