Our “Greenpoint at Work” interview series takes a look at the lives of people living and/or working in the Greenpoint-Williamsburg area.
For this edition, we spoke to Eileen Tyrrell, a bookseller at WORD Bookstore (126 Franklin St.) For nearly 20 years, WORD has served as a beloved community hub, the neighborhood’s own indie bookstore with a focus on local authors. As a frequent WORD customer (too frequent, my debit card might say), it was a real treat to get a peak behind the curtain of how a bookstore operates.
Check out the most recent “Greenpoint at Work” profile here.
This interview has been lightly condensed and edited for clarity.
Tell us a little bit about you, and how you ended up in this field.
I’ve always loved reading and writing, of course. When I moved to the city, I wasn’t totally sure what I wanted to do. I actually got my degree in engineering and decided I didn’t want to pursue a career in the field because I just didn’t really enjoy it at all. While I was figuring out what was next for me, I got a part-time job at a bookstore, just for seasonal holiday help. I really enjoyed it, so when that was over, I kept working for more jobs at other bookstores. I eventually got hired part-time at WORD and pretty quickly ended up stepping up into a full-time role. Now I’ve been here for three years since then, and I honestly love it. I have no idea what the future holds, but I would do this forever, honestly I really love it.
What is a typical day on the job?
We have set tasks that kind of have to get done every day. As for what order they need to get done or the priority of a specific day, it varies, but it’s sort of up to us to decide what we want to work on that day, which is really nice.
A typical day would look like you get in, get settled, and the first thing you want to do is go through our emails and online orders and tackle those. From there, there’s always shelving —we have so many books on our shelving cart at any one time, it’s the endless Sisyphean task of the store. There’s also receiving, which is when we get books from the publishers. That happens five days a week, as well. Those all have to be received into our inventory, so that’s pretty time consuming. Of course, you’re doing all this at the register, helping customers and giving book recommendations in between these tasks, which is honestly the most fun part of the job.
When they come up to the register and you’re working on something else, people always apologize for interrupting. And I’m like, no, that’s actually like the fun part. Like I’d rather be giving recs and talking to you!
I’ve always been curious because WORD is such a small bookstore, I’m always amazed and thinking that y’all probably have to be so vigilant about shelving and spacing.
Yeah, it’s kind of, like, the endless task. I don’t think people realize that we do send books back to the publishers because, as you mentioned, we only have so much shelf space and there are hundreds of new books published every week. We do go through and do something called “pulls” which is when we’ll take books off the shelf, scan them, see when they last sold, and if it’s been a while, we’ll send them back to the publisher. Which is always sad but we have to make room for the new books!
We already kind of touched on this, but what is your favorite part of the job?
It’s definitely the fact that you’re in an environment where your job is talking about books, asking people what they’re reading, what they liked and disliked recently, and recommending new books. It’s being in a space where your work also aligns with a hobby or passion that you have, so you’re actually being paid to talk about that passion—it’s really rewarding. It’s great to meet so many different people—our customers in Greenpoint are really amazing. I think we have a great community here.
What are some books that you’ve been recommending lately?
I read a lot of nonfiction and tend to recommend whatever nonfiction book I’ve most recently been fascinated by. Currently it’s a book that came out in the 1990s called The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman. It’s a case study of Hmong immigrants in California who had a daughter with severe epilepsy and it’s about the cross-cultural difficulties and communication problems they had, because these were immigrants who didn’t speak English, who were new to the United States and had vast cultural differences, and so how did they navigate the divide with their American English-speaking doctors? It really is just an amazing book.
I also just read Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke, which we cannot keep on the shelf. It’s about a trad wife who wakes up one day in 1855 and has to live out this life that she’s been idealizing on her social media. It has been really fun to talk to people about that one.
Are there any hidden gems in the store that you’d like to see people pick up more?
There’s this book called The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa that has been flying under the radar. I think it’s very similar to I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman, which has become wildly popular over the last couple of years, and I find The Memory Police to be very similar but somehow it escaped the knowledge of BookTok. That one is definitely a hidden gem. There’s also this new sci-fi horror book called There Is No Antimemetics Division which I thought was one of the most original stories I’ve read in the past several years. It just came out last year, and I don’t know why more people aren’t talking about it. It blew me away, but it’s flying under the radar.
What have you noticed about the neighborhood’s reading habits?
People are really into a very narrow set of nonfiction. Patrick Radden Keefe sells really well here, David Grann sells really well. For fiction, we’re having a big surge in translated Japanese work. We don’t sell as many graphic novels as our sister store in Jersey City, but we are selling more manga these days than in the past.
There’s always sort of a “Brooklyn book of the summer” — a couple years ago it was All Fours by Miranda July. Last year we were randomly selling a lot of Sunburn. But there tends to be a sort of literary fiction book or maybe a couple books that do really well during the summer. And then I’ll go to other bookstores in other neighborhoods, and they won’t even have them on display.
Memoirs tend to do pretty well — Strangers by Belle Burden, we cannot keep on the shelves.
What are some of your favorite local spots?
I have to give a huge shout out to Paulie Gee’s (110 Franklin St.)— my good friend Nick is the manager, it’s a great slice shop. I go there for lunch a lot; they have really good pizza. I love Transmitter Park, of course, I love going there on my lunch break or after lunch, or if I have people in town, I’ll always send them there. As far as other businesses, I love Homecoming (116 Franklin St.) for coffee — in my humble opinion, they have the best coffee in Greenpoint. Also The WonderMart (141 India St.) is this really cute tchotchke shop. We have a lot of tchotchke shops in Greenpoint, and they’re all great, but there’s something extra special about the stuff they bring into The WonderMart. They’re all locally made, most of them are handmade — jewelry, magnets, home decor. I love that shop. I sometimes have to avoid going in because the temptation to spend too much money is always insane while I’m there.
What do you like to do when you’re not working?
I love volunteering. I have a mutual aid close by where I live that I try to cook for every week. I also volunteer writing letters to people stuck in immigration detention through this organization called HIAS. I also love to go to the movies — I’m a proud AMC A-lister — and I really love going to yoga and hanging out with my friends.