A chance encounter with a bookshop in Nairobi sounds like something out of a detective story. And, in a way, it is.
A few weeks ago, five mysterious boxes arrived at Books & Company. The international, Copenhagen-area English-language bookstore receives shipments just about every day, but the size of this delivery from a publisher in New Jersey and its atypical delivery method (via freight forwarder instead of courier) caused confusion straight away.
The bewilderment grew as staff member Rebecca opened the boxes, revealing up to 20 copies of novels like The Last King of Scotland by Giles Foden and Stay with Me by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀, along with a selection of nonfiction works and titles for young adults and children. Books & Company owner Isabella Mousavizadeh Smith only ever requests three copies of a title at most in order to maximise variation. As she said: “The way we curate the store gives us the possibility of having lots of different titles; we don’t have big stacks of bestsellers.”
No orders were expected for book clubs, schools, or libraries that would explain this volume. While the team had seen book orders go off course every now and then, those had been easily resolved occurrences like a misdelivery for the bookstore down the street and never at this scale. How had this shipment ended up at Books & Company? And what on earth would they do with five boxes of books they hadn’t ordered?
Reaching out to the publisher revealed that the books had been meant for a bookshop in Nairobi, Kenya. Returning the five boxes to New Jersey or forwarding them to their intended destination would be logistically complicated and too expensive and the Books & Company team had no luck finding the Kenyan bookstore.
Viewing the misdirected shipment as a gift instead of a burden, the team embraced the arrivals. They created an engaging window display and shared the tale through the Books & Company Instagram and Facebook accounts, as well as Shoptalk, their email newsletter. The response from customers has been incredible. As Isabella and I sat at the window of the bookshop talking about the mystery of the misdelivered books on a rainy weekday morning, several customers asked about the display. “It’s drawn people in,” Isabella observed. “It’s given them something to ask questions about.”
Kenyans living in the Copenhagen area have stopped in to check out the titles from their homeland. “It’s hard being so far from home,” reflected Isabella. “So when there’s a display like this, it can feel as though someone sees you, someone sees your culture.” And the books are selling, too. All 23 titles (but not yet all copies) that arrived in the shipment have found readers. Biographies like Dreams in a Time of War by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and The Girl Who Smiled Beads by Clemantine Wamariya to non-fiction works like Facing Mount Kenya by Jomo Kenyatta and China’s Second Continent by Howard W. French now sit on Danish bookshelves.
As Isabella suspected, people in Denmark are interested in reading new authors who might not be so well known in Europe. These titles from Africa just scratch the surface of what is a fascinating, deep and diverse treasure of literature from countries often viewed only through a Western lens. “You look at this and think you actually don’t know anything about African literature. You know just the tip of the iceberg,” said Isabella. “This offered the possibility to show everyone that there is such a huge treasure trove of culture across the African continent.”
Customers weren’t the only ones reading Isabella’s musings about this chance encounter. Having learnt about the misdirected shipment when she read the email newsletter, Iris, the rep from the publisher in New Jersey got in touch — and forwarded the Books & Company newsletter to Joan, her counterpart in Nairobi. Joan recognised the titles and, in turn, reached out to the Books & Company team to express her joy that the order she’d placed for the bookshop in Nairobi had found a new audience. Isabella passed along that Joan is “glad that the books found a different home. It’s not just a place for them to be, they’ve created a new community and they’ve created a new connection.”
“We feel very much that our books reflect who we are. Over the course of 16 years, the curation has come to reflect who our community is,” said Isabella. “I think this is a gift. This helps build a community that’s far beyond what we are right here. And because we’re an international bookstore, we have tons of people from all over.”
As an independent bookseller, Isabella aims to ensure the titles on the Books & Company shelves reflect the local community and offer interesting works to explore. “We have so many regular customers and it’s important that they see new things,” she noted. She works directly with publishers to gain insight into new authors and trends, delighting in introducing readers to indie authors and writing that corporate bookshops may not see as not a safe bet. “If I didn’t work with publishers directly, this would never have happened.”
The mystery of how the books had come to be in Denmark rather than Kenya had been solved. An administrative error at the publisher allowed these wayward titles to find homes with readers in Europe, who have likely seen something they otherwise wouldn’t have. The bookshop in Nairobi has received their own five box shipment and gained a compelling story of their selections influencing a community of readers more than 6,700 km away.
While Books & Company staff keep an eye out for what the store could do better to increase the diversity of the titles on their shelves, it can be challenging to look in different directions when so much of the output from publishers centres on Western works. “I want to be an international book store. I try to have as many cultures represented, as many different types of people,” said Isabella. But as she looked at the titles in these five boxes meant for Nairobi, she considered how heavily “we look to the US or the UK as beacons of culture, and there’s this huge continent that we know so little about.” Isabella continued, “This felt so authentic. It wasn’t us trying to find something from an African country. This reflects what a bookstore in Nairobi would order. That’s impossible to find without actually traveling there.”
In addition to offering about 7,000 titles in shop, spanning children’s books, graphic novels, magazines, books for young adults, and all kinds of adult fiction and nonfiction, Books & Company organizes about a dozen book clubs. They also make excellent coffee (along with tea and fruit juices) and host several events a month, with the next ones coming at the end of August following a summer break. Past events include a book-centered quiz night, musical performances and live podcast recordings, and, of course, plenty of book talks.
Books & Company doesn’t have a webshop, but you can order just about anything you want from them by filling out the order request on their website. Best of all, it usually takes just three to five days for books to arrive in store — and there’s no detective work necessary from staff to determine who ordered them!
Find more information about Books & Company on their website or through Instagram, Facebook, or LinkedIn.
