Retail Tales

While compiling the Remembering Marshall Field's book list for the Lake Forest – Lake Bluff Historical Society’s recent program, we discovered Emily Kimbrough's book, Through Charley’s Door, published in 1952.  Kimbrough used details from interviews with long-time Marshall Field's employees and her own recollection to write this humorous account of working in Marshall Field's advertising department in the 1920s.  For this posting, we thought we'd look for other accounts (non-fiction and fiction) of life in the retail world.  Here are some titles we found, and you can find others at the Retail Tales book list in our catalog.

Summer at Tiffany by Marjorie Hart (Morrow, 2007): At 82, Hart recalls the summer of 1945 that she and her best friend spent working as pages on the sales floor of Tiffany and Co. in New York City.

The Easy Hour by Leslie Stella (Three Rivers Press, 2003):  A humorous novel in which Lisa Galisa has less success selling sportswear in a Chicago department store than helping run a retro-themed happy hour, The Easy Hour, at a tavern in Bridgeport.





Shopgirl by Steve Martin (Hyperion, 2000):  Mirabelle is a shy young woman from Vermont who works in the glove department of Beverly Hill's Neiman Marcus store.  She has few friends and little social life until embarking on a relationship with a wealthy businessman twice her age.

The Jew Store by Stella Suberman (Algonquin Books, 2001):  The author's family, the Bronsons, were the first Jews to live in the small Tennessee town of Concordia when they moved there from New York in the 1920s for her father to open a dry goods store.  This memoir tells of her optimistic father, her anxious mother, and their family's time in the south.