My January post mentioned The Mayfair Bookshop, a historical novel by Eliza Knight.  It featured Nancy Mitford who frequented and subsequently worked in London’s Heywood Hill bookshop during the later years of WWII.  
 
My current read is the recently published Mitford Affair by historical fiction heavyweight, Marie Benedict. Alternating chapters frame the pre-WWII years through the eyes of three high-profile Mitford sisters. Diana and Unity have become confidants of Hitler; Nancy is a struggling author, appalled that her sisters and parents have embraced fascism. 
 
My next book will be The Six: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters, a biography by Laura Thompson.  These books are not in Coffman’s Library but can be borrowed at local libraries with a Ramsey County Library card.  

By Audrey Estebo, Library Committee

The Coffman community is back. We’re having potlucks and sing-alongs, we watch movies together, we meet in person, we are going out to plays and restaurants, and we’re traveling! The Library Committee is thrilled that lockdown is loosening but, honestly, we were maybe just a little concerned that library usage would slip in 2022. Happily, that wasn’t the case. In spite of fewer COVID restrictions and a three-week closure for carpet installation, overall usage of the Library held firm in 2022 at 1,189 checkouts. Sixty-four of the units at Coffman checked out at least one book from our library.

​We keep our Library up to date with monthly book buys, the fall BookFest buy (fifty-five new books last year), and donations. To be sure, we are acquiring the titles you want to read, and the committee likes to take stock of Coffman’s reading habits each year’s end.

​By Carol Van Why, Library Co-Chair

I grabbed Information Hunters: When Librarians, Soldiers, and Spies Banded Together in World War II Europe by Kathy Peiss from my Arizona public library’s Recent Arrivals bookshelf. It dovetailed nicely with my current reading binge, revolving around WWII, bookshops, libraries, and spies. 
 
My addiction began with finding Janet Skeslien Charles’ Paris Library and Madeline Martin’s Last Bookshop in London in the Coffman Library. Both titles share characteristics of good historical fiction—a mix of actual persons and places along with fictional ones. 
 
I’ve since read Madeline Martin’s Librarian Spy, Elizabeth Knight’s Mayfair Bookshop and Michelle Gable’s Bookseller’s Secret. Now my binge reading has expanded to encompass Nancy Mitford and her eccentric family members, some of them, notorious.  Read all of these books to see how they are intertwined.