Prairie Lights 'Feels Like Everyone's Store'

Shelf Awareness

"Like all great bookstores, Prairie Lights feels secure and comforting. There are many sections I never browse---it's healthy to feel limited; and, given the store's 40,000 titles, inevitable. 
A staircase rises to the natural light of the second floor, where a café buzzes, and the bookcases roll away for the almost-nightly readings. 
On a recent Sunday afternoon, it was overflowing with a crowd of young and old who had turned out for a reading by the most recent winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction; at the end of an hour, it seemed as if absolutely everyone were standing in the lines for an autographed copy.

"It is at such moments, and not only during a bad day at work, that I wonder why I didn't, fifteen years ago when I arrived in Iowa City, apply for a job. I wouldn't mind unpacking and labeling and section-coding and alphabetizing new arrivals, or learning the art of buying from a publisher's backlist.
When I walk past a case, my hand, of itself, aligns a spine reshelved too deeply. And I've come to notice that these opportunities to surreptitiously straighten are rare, because the shelves tend to be immaculate, resonating with the loving attention paid to them. And then I can't help suspecting that there are more hands at work than just the staff's--that many, if not most, of the customers are, like me, always working there in spirit; and that this is why Prairie Lights feels like everyone's store."

--Hugh Ferrer in the Buenos Aires Review