I’ve long thought that if a neighborhood has a coffee shop, a movie theater, and a bookstore, it has a lot going for it. I can’t speak to the coffee culture and moviegoing options in Lytham St Annes, England, but, from Katie Clapham’s delightful new book, I get a sense that the roots of a literary community, however modest, are taking hold there. In Receipts From the Bookshop: A Bookseller’s Year in an English Seaside Town (Morrow/HarperCollins, Sept. 8), Clapham shares her daily experiences running an independent bookstore in Lancashire. She owns the shop with her mother, whom she refers to as Business Mum; regular patrons include her daughter (Bookwormlet) and grandmother (Retirement Gran). “A lady comes heaving into the bookshop to pick up her order before I close,” she writes on a January day. “‘Oh, you’re amazing!’ she says to me, a simple prawn [a fool] in a bookshop. ‘You’ve really saved my bacon!’ she exclaims as she buys a paperback. Which shows that, sometimes, there really is a book emergency.”

Clapham’s memoir is one of a batch of spirited new books about the world of books. Several thousand miles away from her shop is the Oakland Public Library, the Northern California institution where Dorothy Lazard worked for two decades. She chronicles her experiences in Behind the Desk at the Main: A Librarian’s Memoir (Heyday, Aug. 18). As our reviewer writes, the book blends “memoir and institutional history to make a compelling case for the crucial importance of the public library as ‘our country’s last truly democratic institution.’…[The library] offers to the city’s economically, racially, and ethnically diverse populations a ‘tutoring center, drop-in day center, accessible public restroom, tax prep center, cafeteria, computer lab, recreation center, day care, and, not coincidentally, information center.’” Lazard reminds readers that the Oakland library is where a “young, voracious reader” fell in love with books long ago. His name: Jack London.

In Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise (Knopf, Sept. 1), Katherine Rundell offers “a rousing, essay-length defense of children’s fiction,” according to our review. Kid lit, the review continues, can offer adults “a sense of imagination, of play, but also…a keen realization of what it feels like to be vulnerable; she perceptively notes that kid lit is aimed at members of society devoid of political power.”

Rebecca Lee is a senior editorial manager at Penguin Random House, and she celebrates words themselves in Rogues, Widows and Orphans: Mischief and Misadventures in the World of Books (Brandeis Univ., Sept. 8). “As someone who loves books, it might seem counter-intuitive that I’m writing one dedicated to all the ways words can go wrong,” she writes. “But as anyone who has gleefully spotted a typo in a prestigious publication, felt a flicker of schadenfreude at a pompous critic’s downfall, or secretly enjoyed a literary scandal knows, it is possible to love books while delighting in their disasters. In fact, a love of books is profoundly enhanced by the stories behind the stories.”

Here’s to that sentiment—provided you don’t find any typos in the above words.

John McMurtrie is the nonfiction editor.