Shelf talker

A shelf talker is one of those little bits of paper which bookstores will stick beneath the books they want to draw your attention to. Shelf talkers are also used, of course, by non-book retailers, but somehow it seems to me an archetypically bookish thing to do. If you’re in doubt about how to go, the Mountain & Plains Independent Booksellers Association provides instruction on how to write a good shelf talker. A klatsch of shelf talkers The shelf talkers in this picture, from Harvard Bookstore in Cambridge, Mass., are quite discursive, whereas I believe most should be rather short; just a sentence or two — after all if it takes a few minutes to read the shelf talker wouldn’t you just decide to pick up the book and read the flap copy? Once upon a time publishers would print up shelf talkers and send them to booksellers. Here’s a twenty-year-old generic example promoting an entire series which is still often shelved in its own section: You can click on the photo to enlarge it. But for…