Peter Miller has kept a design bookshop in Seattle for more than forty years. He has also written three books: manuals about cooking and preparing food and about eating together. In this fourth book, he writes, for the first time, about his day job: shopkeeping. Miller crafts stories from the bookshop floor-the joys, the perils, the hopes, the economics, and the details of running a shop. This essay collection is for shop lovers, patrons, and owners-it captures the art, the task, and the heart of shopkeeping. Readers will come to understand how crucial the shop is to our towns and cities, representing the character and the strength and testament of a community. This is a manual, of sorts. A manual to the art of shopkeeping. It will surely lure you to shops-it may even lure you to owning one.