Shopkeeping: Stories, Advice, and Observations

A love letter to the small shop, and shop owners everywhere, by beloved bookseller Peter Miller.

“There is a tradition of shopkeeping, a tradition of codes, etiquette, and customs. For the most part, it is an oral history, passed along, person to person. You learn to be a retailer—not by going to college, but by going to work. You learn from people who have learned how to run a shop.” [from the Introduction]

For more than four decades, Peter Miller has run a design bookshop that shares his name in Seattle. He has also written three of his own books, manuals about cooking and about food and about eating together. In this love letter to his day job, Miller writes for the first time about his other love: shopkeeping.

Miller crafts stories from the bookshop floor with wry humor and skillful storytelling. Readers are taken on a shopkeeping journey and will come to understand along the way that small shops characterize our towns and cities, making them unique, special, and worth visiting and living near. This essay collection is for shop lovers everywhere and captures the art and heart of running a local shop treasured by the community that surrounds it. By the end, you can’t help wanting to own a shop.

About the Author

Peter Miller opened Peter Miller Books, an architecture bookshop, in Seattle in 1980, and has grown it into the thriving and beloved local bookshop it is today. He was a member of the Seattle Design Commission from 1998 to 2001, an honorary member of the AIA, and a writer for Food52 and Post Alley. He lives in Langley, Whidbey Island, WA, with his wife Colleen and takes the Sounder train each morning to work.