Nadia Wassef. Shelf Life: Chronicles of a Cairo Bookseller, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, NY, 2021. 240 pp., $27.00, Hardcover. ISBN: 9780374600181

In the US, there is no shortage of book sellers, no matter how prosperous or poor one’s community or ability to afford a $27 hardcover: Where there are no libraries, there might be independent bookstores (although often one community will have both); where there are no independent bookstores, there is perhaps a Barnes and Noble; if there are no bookstores at all, there is a big-box store; and, where there are no in-person retail locations, in the vast and empty spaces of America, Amazon situates itself within the vacuum, the postal service its steed, its duty to deliver mail to every address. This ubiquity is not the case the world over. For twelve years I lived in Beirut, Lebanon—a city with a thriving literary culture, though one with no public libraries, where the price of an average American hardcover book was about six percent of the monthly minimum wage, a number that has risen to 102 percent as of this writing due to the country’s economic and financial crisis-induced hyperinflation. So, although Lebanon is home to several indies—including a century-plus-old national franchise selling books in the country’s three national languages—Arabic, English and French—bookstores as they are designed in the West are essentially spaces for the worldly literati. For this reason (albeit of many), Lebanon was on my mind while reading Nadia Wassef’s memoir, Shelf Life: Chronicles of a Cairo Bookseller, her account of cofounding and operating (alongside her sister, Hind, and her longtime friend, Nihal) Cairo’s first Western-style independent bookstore/café, Diwan, from 2002 to the mid-2010s. “Diwan” is an Arabic word with several meanings, as Wassef describes: “a collection of poetry in Persian and Arabic, a meeting place, a guesthouse, a sofa, and a title for a high-ranking officer. ‘Diwani’ was a type of Arabic calligraphy.” Diwan’s bold logo played on this calligraphic nature: English letters adorned with


Introduction
In the US, there is no shortage of book sellers, no matter how prosperous or poor one's community or ability to afford a $27 hardcover: Where there are no libraries, there might be independent bookstores (although often one community will have both); where there are no independent bookstores, there is perhaps a Barnes and Noble; if there are no bookstores at all, there is a big-box store; and, where there are no in-person retail locations, in the vast and empty spaces of America, Amazon situates itself within the vacuum, the postal service its steed, its duty to deliver mail to every address.
This ubiquity is not the case the world over. For twelve years I lived in Beirut, Lebanon-a city with a thriving literary culture, though one with no public libraries, where the price of an average American hardcover book was about six percent of the monthly minimum wage, a number that has risen to 102 percent as of this writing due to the country's economic and financial crisis-induced hyperinflation. So, although Lebanon is home to several indies-including a century-plus-old national franchise selling books in the country's three national languages-Arabic, English and French-bookstores as they are designed in the West are essentially spaces for the worldly literati.
For this reason (albeit of many), Lebanon was on my mind while reading Nadia Wassef's memoir, Shelf Life: Chronicles of a Cairo Bookseller, her account of cofounding and operating (alongside her sister, Hind, and her longtime friend, Nihal) Cairo's first Western-style independent bookstore/café, Diwan, from 2002 to the mid-2010s. "Diwan" is an Arabic word with several meanings, as Wassef describes: "a collection of poetry in Persian and Arabic, a meeting place, a guesthouse, a sofa, and a title for a high-ranking officer. 'Diwani' was a type of Arabic calligraphy." Diwan's bold logo played on this calligraphic nature: English letters adorned with Arabic diacritics, rounded off with the Arabic letter "N", ‫,ن‬ which graced many a tote bag and, significantly, "worked phonetically in Arabic, English, and French." Shelf Life's chapters are named after Diwan's sections, e.g., "Egypt Essentials", "Cookery", "The Café," further highlighting its international appeal.
Shelf Life is an intimate, richly textured, and ultimately bittersweet portrait of Egypt, whose current incarnation as a fraught, unequal nation straining in the aftermath of colonial rule, poor governance, and, post-2010, the Arab Spring, falls far short of its own awesome, millennia-spanning cultural legacy. Indeed, the book's core tension lies in the fact that Diwan is a success story at all, which says as much about Wassef's vision and perseverance as it does the high tolerance for risk afforded her by her class position. Wassef states early, and reinforces often, her and her co-founders' privileged status as "bourgeois housewives" (as an Egyptian bureaucrat disparagingly calls them). Wassef herself is the product of a British education and two master's degrees at an internationally accredited university, a life, she emphasizes, financed by dollars instead of Egyptian pounds. They have the starting capital to open a business in the exclusive Zamalek neighborhood in the heart of Cairo, a verdant oasis of embassies, tourists, and expats, and to expand to several of Cairo's wealthy neighborhoods and mall-anchored suburbs, the stores themselves laid out in a way that any European or American would find familiar.
Diwan reached a peak of 11 branches, before contracting to nine (the current number) when it became clear that the mixture of clientele served at the original Zamalek flagship would be difficult to reproduce at scale. And when, in the years following the Arab Spring, Wassef's life in Egypt became unsustainable due to its rising volatility, she was able to resign from her ownership of the company and move to London, where she now resides.
Ray Oldenburg's concept of the "third place"-a place that is neither home nor work-was a foundational principle underlying Wassef's vision for Diwan. In her own words, third places are "locations for community building," and almost all such places existing in Egypt before the opening of Diwan catered to men (mosques, barbershops, coffee shops, sports clubs), with only the homes left over for women ("which they rarely owned")-none of which, then, are spaces lending themselves to the robust intellectual and culturally appreciative atmosphere Wassef prides herself on creating at Diwan: a space that, during the Arab Spring, "became confession-als…. a place to escape from, or return to, the political moment" for Egyptians who had hit the street-surely a more diverse crowd than Diwan's usual, but not, one would assume, one of book-buyers.
Does this mean that a private business catering mostly to Egypt's wealthy and expat communities, a space where the price of some of the titles exceeds the monthly wages of Diwan's employees, was also the nation's first progressive, feminist third place? Wassef does not say, but the portrait of Egypt she paints suggests that this may be the case.