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Today I am reposting the editorial intro and link to the latest issue of Corner Shelf, the place where readers' advisory meets collection development.
Click here to read it all, or see the link below Susan Maguire's intro.
Hello Shelfers!
Sometimes something happens somewhere on the internet, some ripple in the matrix, and a backlist book comes to the fore again. I'm talking about TikTok, and I'm talking about The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo.
Sometime last year, BookTok discovered Taylor Jenkins Reid's juicy 2017 novel about a movie star legend who recounts her life story—framed by her seven husbands—to a young journalist. The book itself will not be news to most of you—library workers have been lauding TJR forever—but its sudden resurgence was a surprise. Why this book? Why that time?
The answer is . . . I don't know. There are plenty of books that are memorable, glamorous, heart-wrenching, and unputdownable. I've long ago resigned myself to the fact that I can't predict what's going to capture the internet's imagination at any given time. The good news is, libraries are in a good position to capitalize on BookTok discovering backlist titles, since we've already got them sitting on our shelves.
(In fact, I totally checked TSHoEH out of my local branch of the Chicago Public Library and read it this weekend.)
(The book is absolutely as addictive as BookTok says it is.)
(Not that you need me to tell you that.)
But maybe some of you are not content to sit back and let #content happen to you; you're making it happen yourselves. Have you (or your library) ventured into BookTok? If so, I'd love to hear from youfor an upcoming Notes from the Field!
Until then, I'll just sit back and watch for the internet's next literary zeitgeist (ahem, Colleen Hoover).
Happy reading!
—Susan Maguire
Senior Editor, Collection Development and Library Outreach, Booklist
smaguire@ala.org
@Booklist_Susan
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