Bookstore Sounds
What is the perfect bookstore soundtrack? Plus, a playlist of songs about books.
This week I returned to bookselling. After a couple of hours of handselling, shelving, chatting with fellow booklovers (both coworkers and patrons), I refound my footing after over seven months away.
My new work home is a university bookstore where trade books, my department, take up less than a third of the space. Our customers, mostly students or their parents or students with their parents, usually come in to buy logoed apparel and textbooks. My goal is to entice them to leave with a book or two as well.
Having worked two days, one of my biggest takeaways is the bookstore’s soundtrack effect on me. The speakers play a variety of top 40 pop hits from the past two or three years. Not original or curated, but a random selection with no rhyme for sequencing. I often find myself nodding my head to the beat, appreciating the alchemy of a catchy pop song, but missing the albums I listened to while working from home.
When I first moved to NYC in 2011, seemingly every bookstore’s playlist was heavily indie rock and spanned years. The Arcade Fire, Sufjan Stevens, Neutral Milk Hotel, and the Decemberists were unavoidable. Things have changed, I have noticed more indie folk like Waxahatchee and Angel Olsen (her new album), and the music tends to be more recently released.
If you owned (or if you do own) a bookstore, what is your ideal soundtrack?
Songs about books makes the most sense to me, so that’s the theme of this week’s playlist:
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