How much experience do you need to start a bookshop?

Hypothetically speaking, what if you have none?

The following post is part of a Seed Pod collaboration about libraries. Seed Pods are a SmallStack community project designed to help smaller publications lift each other up by publishing and cross-promoting around a common theme. We’re helping each other plant the seeds for growth!

The idea of starting a bookshop didn’t come to me all at once. Was I born with it? More likely, my mother gifted it to me slowly, over years. Growing up, we pretty much lived at the Woodland California Library. We went every week without fail, and we were never in a rush. She set aside whole afternoons for these excursions, never mind how busy she must have been raising five children. I made full use of library resources, always in search of a new niche topic or cool research trick. During my cryptozoology phase, I requested microfiche tapes of the local paper around the times of major Loch Ness Monster sightings. Disappointingly, I found nary a mention of obscure non-news from Scotland in nineteen-thirties issues of The Daily Democrat. I was over the moon when I found out about interlibrary loan, since I’d already read everything at my local branch by and about my crush, T.E. Lawrence. Never mind that he was gay, and dead these sixty years. My library gave me access to a world beyond my own.

I was born in the early eighties. The closest thing we had to the modern internet back then was calling the “Time Lady” and hearing her say mechanically, “At the tone, Pacific Standard Time will be. Eight. Fifty. Seven. A.M.” Beep! For information on any other topic, you had to resort to your own bookshelves. And if you exhausted the books at home, the library. I would spend hours going back and forth between the stacks and the card catalog, doing research for homeschool projects and my personal fascinations.

I sometimes go back my childhood library when I visit my parents. The card catalog is no longer in use. But it’s on display at the library, and sometimes I get this desperate urge to open the drawers and riffle through in search of my memories.

To me, that card catalog felt like a mystical receptacle of knowledge. It had all the wizardry of the algorithms we love to hate these days, but with an appealing human touch. Someone had chosen each word, thought about which subjects to include, typed it all carefully out on those cards. It was like that long-ago librarian was holding your hand, guiding you in discovering the many things you wished to know.

I still feel such nostalgia for the card catalog. In the depths of the pandemic, we put our bed on stilts to carve me out an office in our tiny Amsterdam flat. Since we were renovating anyway, I turned my wooden drawers back to front, added brass pulls, and recreated that card catalog.

My pens and notebooks, sealing wax, ribbons and research no longer spill out over my desk. And every time I look at that homemade card catalog, I feel a burst of happiness.

Believe me, those drawers are magic.

As a teenager, I spent summers volunteering at the library. I would make photocopies, put together prize bags for the summer reading program, and—best of all—reshelve books. You know the signs in the library: “please do not reshelve the books”? Ah, the thrill of being the one who’s allowed to go behind the librarians-only desk to retrieve the book cart, then lovingly restore each book to its proper place.

Why, in retrospect, didn’t I grow up to be a librarian? Good question. Would it be strange if I said it never occurred to me that I could? I wasn’t supposed to grow up to be anything. Anything but a mother, that is. I was raised Mormon. Education for girls was encouraged; preparing for a career was not. A degree from the same Mormon-run university where my parents met was a backup plan—in the unlikely event that my life failed to follow the accepted script. But a major function of college was meant to be four years of opportunities to find a suitable husband. These were the facts of my life.

It took me an iffy couple of extra years after graduation, but I managed to safely settle down at the ripe old age of twenty-three. I’d been an old maid for a few years already, so I breathed a sigh of relief when my future husband (considered a “menace to society” as a still-unmarried man of twenty-five) proposed, four months after we met. As expected, when I got pregnant a year after our wedding, I quit the secretarial job I’d been working to put my husband through school. He became the breadwinner. My mother said it strengthened a marriage for the woman to be dependent on the man.

Nine years of righteous full-time mothering later, a feminist awakening and desire to contribute to family finances led me back to work. By that time it felt far past any talk of what I might want to be. I focused on my skillset and felt lucky to get a decently paying job in marketing. I worked in that field for a few years. Then my husband asked me to quit my job and help him start a business. So I did. I made his website, wrote copy for his marketing brochures, and served as his regular sounding board. After a year of that, he leveraged his considerable skills, hard work, and demographic privilege to get back into a career he’s been doing ever since.

He makes a lot more money than I ever did. More than I can imagine being able to make. I know that’s partly because the shape of my imagination came from what little-girl me was told about herself. Needless to say, I speak to my daughter differently. I try to speak to myself differently too, but sometimes old habits are hard to break. I’m not meaning to complain. There’s tremendous privilege in having a partner whose financial means let you pursue the tenuously remunerative craft of writing. I’m just explaining why I was in my late thirties before I let myself think about what I’d like to be when I grow up.

I went to grad school at 39. I realized halfway through my master’s degree that I didn’t actually want to be a professor. Then I spent a couple of years writing a novel. A few months ago I finished a memoir I’m now querying to agents. It’s about all the crazy things I did in the years after I left the Mormon Church. This is the first time I’ve confessed in public to writing a memoir. I didn’t mean to; it just tumbled out. I hovered over the backspace key, then let it be. It feels embarrassing, hubristic: insisting your life story is interesting enough to be published, even read. Being willing to spill your secrets. It must be a blend of masochism and exhibitionism that leads to a person hammering out a book of all the intimate, terrible, wonderful things that ever happened to them.

More on that later, maybe. I think I brought it up because when I started researching how to open a bookshop, I came across a podcast called Got Books. Antonia—the host—interviews bookshop owners around the world. Something I noticed right away was how many of them got their start in middle age, or even after they retired. It felt like a kind of permission to rethink seeing myself as a failure.

Innate perfectionism and religion can be a difficult combination. I’ve spent much of my life consumed by guilt. I used to feel guilty every time I did things not directly related to motherhood. Who did I think I was? Why was I putting time into anything other than raising my precious children? I imagined the women around me feeling completely fulfilled by stay-at-home motherhood, and wondered what was wrong with me.

(No shade if that’s the life you choose, and it nourishes your heart. Motherhood as a primary identity was chosen for me, and it wasn’t the greatest fit.)

After I left the Mormon Church, I felt guilty all over again. What kind of example had I set for my daughter all those years? Why wasn’t I smart and driven enough to instantly catch up professionally? It took a long time to unravel these expectations of myself, to loosen my hold on shame, to start feeling less alone. Turns out waking up partway through life in need of a drastic change of course is nowhere near as uncommon as I thought.

People do lots of different things at a time like that. Opening a bookshop is one. It’s not like being a librarian: there are no gatekeepers to ask for qualifications or a relevant degree. A lot of people who start bookshops have zero prior experience selling books. Nobody seems to go into it for the money, though most are trying their best to make a living. I guess it’s the kind of quixotic venture raw passion keeps aloft. Until it doesn’t. It’s easy to find statistics on how likely you are to fail. Late capitalism isn’t built to nourish the soul.

We have to do that kind of building on our own. Building lives, building dreams, building spaces where we come together and nurture our humanity. Meeting ourselves and each other where we are; letting parts of us blossom that were root-bound before. That’s why I want my bookshop to have the feel of my childhood library. I envision the kind of place I don’t mind if you just come in to browse. I want to make it somewhere you long to return because you love how it makes you feel. I’d be the first to admit that my future bookshop is all wrapped up in my identity. But it also comes from a need for community. I think that’s why I started writing here. I keep thinking of something Goethe once said:

The world is so empty if one thinks only of mountains, rivers and cities; but to know someone here and there who thinks and feels with us, and though distant, is close to us in spirit — this makes the earth for us an inhabited garden.

I’m talking about you. Yes, you. Wherever on this wide green earth you are, I’m glad you’re here. Thanks for coming along with me. Someday I hope we have a chance to sit down in the bookshop with a cup of tea and chat books. Until then, feel free to comment if you feel so inclined. I love hearing what you think.

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