Two Booksellers Reveal How They Stock Their Shelves: 'I Don't Really Follow What's Popular'
- - Two Booksellers Reveal How They Stock Their Shelves: 'I Don't Really Follow What's Popular'
Charlotte PhillippDecember 20, 2025 at 5:03 AM
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Lucy Yu, owner of Yu and Me Books in Manhattan, and Emma Straub, owner of Brooklyn's Books Are Magic, are revealing what they look for when adding new stories to their collection (Stock image) -
Lucy Yu, owner of Yu & Me Books in Manhattan, and Emma Straub, owner of Brooklyn's Books Are Magic, are revealing what they look for when adding new stories to their collection
Both booksellers say that specificity is key when curating their shelves
"When you chase trends, by the time you get up to it, the trend has changed," Yu says
Two of New York City's most prominent independent booksellers are opening up about how their curate their shelves.
Speaking with host Danielle Robay for the Dec. 9 episode of the "Bookmarked" podcast from Reese Witherspoon's book club, Lucy Yu, owner of Yu & Me Books in Manhattan, and Emma Straub, owner of Brooklyn's Books Are Magic, revealed what they look for when adding new stories to their collection.
For Yu, her shop's focus on immigrant stories and writers of color helps her to narrow the search and know what to prioritize on her shelves — "but there's so much range in that," she notes.
"There's so much translated fiction that you could bring into that. How do you wanna extend what an immigrant story means and the breadth of availability for that kind of literature?" she says. "And what I wanna offer people is for them to come in every week and see a bunch of new titles that they've never seen before."
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Yu adds that she doesn't consult bestseller lists — or what's popular on BookTok, considering how fast those trends can change — when working on Yu & Me's stock. Instead, she and her staff rely on the tastes of their readership to make their curation the best it can be.
"I also don't really follow what's popular out there," she shares. "We have a really intuitive curation process where we understand where our taste is and our taste is focusing on language and stories that really push apart the layers of perception and get to the core of what it means to live in this person's brain or live in the story. And that goes beyond what's popular."
"I think there's this chasing of popularity, especially in publishing, like with BookTok and how that's gotten so popular, this chasing of that. And when you chase trends, by the time you get up to it, the trend has changed," Yu continues. "So I feel like for us, the longevity of taste is something that we really prioritize."
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As for the collection at Books Are Magic — which has two locations — Straub says she tends to cater to her customer base's tastes, which can often change depending on demographic.
"All of our people are in that store all the time, but it's a little bit older," she says of the crowd at her shop's second location. "And so, we sell so many more mysteries at the second store than we do at the first store... or we sell more biographies."
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Straub also aims to diversify her catalogue, stocking both classics and new works from writers of all backgrounds.
"I don't wanna say [we're], like, anti-old white man writers," she quips, "because there are a lot of old white man writers that I love and that we have on our shelves all the time. But when you look at a stack, that's not what you're gonna see at Books Are Magic."
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"I'm 45 now, so like I don't feel that young anymore. But I think we are still a young store and we have a lot of young customers and young readers," she continues, calling her customers "smart, cool readers."
Yu and Straub also shared which books they're recommending to their customers as of late. For Yu, Mother Mary Comes to Me, the new memoir from Arundhati Roy, "has really, really done it for me," while Straub recommends Margaret Atwood's "memoir of sorts" Book of Lives.
"When I imagined [Atwood] before reading this book, I was like, 'Yeah, she writes amazing poetry. She writes amazing novels. She's like a badass lady'," she says.
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"There is so much blood in this book. Like there's just farm life. She is not afraid of anything," Straub adds. "This woman knows how to wield a knife and she is just not afraid."
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Source: “AOL Entertainment”
