Imagine a group of friends sitting around chatting about what they most wish they could do. Two of them say, “Open a bookstore,” and by the end of the night, they decide to move forward with the plan, and the others agree to invest.
That scenario would be fraught enough if the group were in, say, Columbus, Ohio, or Harrogate, England, but the friends in question were in Cairo, Egypt, where culture and politics argued against success for an independent bookstore.
As described in Nadia Wassef’s engaging memoir, Shelf Life: Chronicles of a Cairo Bookseller, that did not deter the author, then 27, her sister, Hind, or their friend Nihal from opening their store, Diwan, in March 2002. They were, perhaps, too innocent to be intimidated, too blissfully ignorant to grasp all that they did not yet know.
Nadia and Hind’s mother came up with the store’s name, which can mean “a collection of poetry in Persian and Arabic, a meeting place, a guesthouse, a sofa…‘Diwani’ is a type of Arabic calligraphy.” A local artist, Minou, designed their logo, decorated their stores, and created a line of shopping bags for Diwan that became the only marketing the store ever needed:
“The Diwan shopping bag became a cultural status symbol on the streets of Cairo. In later years, when I glimpsed one of our bags on a London street, or a New York subway, the feeling was electrifying.”
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