The current issue of the Brooklyn Rail carries Scott Sherman‘s charming profile of Giggles, the “tiniest bookshop in Chennai, India’s fourth-largest city,” a store that “until two years ago, was located inside the lobby of the hotel, in a space that is now a ladies’ restroom.”

“To get to the shop,” Sherman writes, “you must first inquire at the hotel’s front desk, where a clerk tells you to exit the lobby and make a left. At the far end of the parking lot, past a majestic peepal tree and within a few feet of roaring traffic, is a narrow strip of shops, one of which displays a small yellow and red sign: ‘Giggles, Biggest Little Bookshop.'”

You still might think you’re lost, as Sherman did, but “Behind the glass window are teetering stacks of books, some of them 10 feet high.”

The shop is owned by the Bangalore-born Nalini Chettur, “a pillar of Chennai’s English-language literary scene, who opened Giggles with a thousand-rupee investment in 1974.” The shop now serves Chennai’s literary community, as well as some famous patrons, which have included V. S. Naipaul, Jan Morris, and William Golding, as well as Amit Chauduri, Amitav Ghosh, and Pankaj Mishra.

Aside from walk-ins by famous writers and others who hear “about Giggles through word of mouth, or from Lonely Planet,” Sherman notes that Chettur has another selling secret: she knows her customers. She can say, for instance:

what her loyal customers like to read, and her instrument for reaching them is the telephone; Chettur, who has never married and who lives alone after the recent death of her mother, opens the shop at 2:30 in the afternoon, and spends her mornings making calls to publishers and customers. “I’ll say to them: ‘I’ve got three or four interesting books. Why don’t you make a trip to Giggles?’ And they like that. Nothing like the phone.