Shelf Life
Remember what it was like to enter your favorite independent bookstore: strolling the shelves of local authors, breathing in the scent of new and used paperbacks, filling your tote bag with hours of printed fun? Shelf Life is a monthly column where Rachel A.G. Gilman tries to recreate this feeling, chatting with owners about the history of their bookstores, how the pandemic has reshaped the bookselling business, and some of their favorite titles.
Prairie Lights Books
“Bookstores are very democratic spaces,” says Weissmiller. “Everyone is welcome. Prairie Lights is a very open place where people from all walks of life feel comfortable and look forward to both extensive browsing and social interaction.” She adds, “Books touch so many aspects of life in any community that the possibilities of partnerships are endless.”
The King’s English Bookshop
“One unexpected bright spot was that so many people finally understood what happens when you don’t shop local. Your favorite restaurants, bars, and stores: they go away and they don’t come back.”
Savoy Bookshop & Café
“I wouldn’t still be doing this after fourteen years if I didn’t believe it what we were doing. But I’m also a realist, and you can’t avoid the real threats to the longevity of bookstores through the supply chain as well as the attacks on books that are happening around the country,” says April.
Duende District
Floor to ceiling windows overlook beautiful Grant Park and the city’s skyline. Old concert posters from bands like Wilco and Sleater-Kinney are interspersed with shelves of titles newish and old, many related to the music industry. A display of every title in the 33⅓ book series profiling various music albums, plus vinyl for sale and a turntable where visitors can rummage through the store’s expansive collection to choose the day’s shopping soundtrack.
Exile in Bookville
Floor to ceiling windows overlook beautiful Grant Park and the city’s skyline. Old concert posters from bands like Wilco and Sleater-Kinney are interspersed with shelves of titles newish and old, many related to the music industry. A display of every title in the 33⅓ book series profiling various music albums, plus vinyl for sale and a turntable where visitors can rummage through the store’s expansive collection to choose the day’s shopping soundtrack.
BookBar
Enter and discover a brick interior with a bar to the right serving local, seasonal food and beverage delights, multiple shelfs of new releases to your left, and a particularly unique check-out counter directly in front composed of stacked, page-out books, where an employee stands, welcoming you.
Book Barn
“It’s a big place and there’s a lot of stuff, so sometimes people are really thrown by it,” says bookseller and writer of Glenn’s Book Notes Glenn Shea, describing how he often sees folks on the phone with each other trying to meet up after wandering off at the Barn. “We do have a guide on our website, but sometimes people will just come in to the front lobby and stop, letting their eyes sort of glaze over.”
Dudley’s Bookshop Café
“Cozy,” “welcoming,” and “eclectic” are all words Tom Beans has heard to describe Dudley’s Bookshop Café. The shop has existed in some form in Bend since the early 70s, but took its current name in 2008 after the then-owner’s English Spaniel.
Bookseller Best Reads of 2021
To wrap up 2021, we touched base with every bookstore profiled to hear about what’s new, and to get their picks for the best thing they’ve read this year.
Powell’s Books
In the words of bookseller Katherine Morgan, Powell’s Books is “big as fuck.” She compares the store (located straight down from Providence Park in downtown Portland, Oregon) to a Macy’s: someone greets you at the front door amidst ever-present background chatter, before leaving you to browse three jam-packed, brightly-lit floors of new and used titles.
A Room of One’s Own
“Room” (which is how employees and patrons lovingly refer to the shop) was first opened in 1975 by a group of women as a feminist bookstore in the downtown area of the Midwestern capital city, hoping to help connect people with one another, as well as to the feminist, lesbian and gay movements.
Bookstore1Sarasota
Bookstore1Sarasota—the county’s only independent bookstore—opened a decade ago. Owner Georgia Court had moved to Sarasota in 2010, in part because of her attraction to a bookstore in town called Sarasota News and Books. However, soon after Court’s move, the store went out of business, breaking her heart.
Literati Bookstore
Despite sounding too quaint to be true, Literati Bookstore is, indeed, a very real place, one named Publishers Weekly Bookstore of the Year in 2019. It was opened eight years ago by Michigan natives Mike and Hilary Gustafson, who, when hearing about the closure of Borders in Ann Arbor, wanted to make sure the city wasn’t without a downtown general bookstore.
Provincetown Bookshop
Joel Newman and Elloyd Hanson took ownership of Provincetown Bookshop in 1963. The life partners spent the rest of their days building up the store, during which time it hosted John Waters as an employee, Norman Mailer as a customer, and a make-out session between Faye Dunaway and Peter Wolf.
Pagination Bookshop
Murvin and co-owner Kory Cooper had always loved indie bookstores, but a weekend trip in 2018 to see George Saunders at St. Louis’s Left Bank Books is what inspired them to finally consider opening up one of their own.
City Lights
City Lights Books Lead Buyer Paul Yamazaki speaks with Rachel A.G. Gilman about the curatorial spirit that Ferlinghetti first imagined, switching to a virtual model, and the importance of spotlighting underrepresented writers, editors, and publishers.
Rough Draft Bar & Books
Rough Draft felt like exactly the kind of literary communal space I had always wanted growing up: somewhere equally equipped for meeting up with friends as it was for drafting out plans for a new writing project, a place where a person could show up when it opened mid-morning and find themselves not leaving until late at night.
Raven Book Store
Along the side of Liberty Hall—a 120-year-old opera house in downtown Lawrence, Kansas—right off bar and restaurant-lined Massachusetts Street, lives Raven Book Store.
The Head and The Hand
The Head and the Hand opened as a bookstore in May of 2019 as an extension of the nonprofit, independent craft publishing company and writers’ workshop of the same name, which started in 2013.