Most mornings, I open the store before the sun hits the front window. The street’s still sleepy, delivery trucks idling outside the bodega, the hum of espresso machines firing up down the block. I turn the key, flick on the lights, and for a few minutes, it’s just me and the books. It feels like holding my breath in a sacred space before the city exhales.
This bookstore was not part of some grand plan. It started as a rebellion for me. I was tired every day of staring at the screen, of deadlines that meant nothing and pretending that a job title made me happy. So I cashed out a modest severance, found a half-shuttered storefront in South Brooklyn, filled it with everything I loved: paperbacks with cracked spines, weird literary journals, dusty hardcovers that smelled like a library in 1986.
Running a bookstore is not a path to riches. It’s a long conversation with uncertainty. One snowstorm can wipe out a week’s sales. One viral TikTok about a new release can bring in a flood of teenagers asking if we have that one book “with the green cover.” We usually don’t. But we always find something better.
It’s mainly the people who make this job impossible to leave. There’s Ezra, the 9-year-old who comes in every Saturday with a dollar and a random question about dragons. There’s the divorced guy who just started reading and cried when he finished A Man Called Ove. There’s the woman who buys one poetry book a month and never says a word. Her eyes do all the talking.
We host a banned book club. We let broke poets pay us in zines. We once let a local band rehearse in the back room, and yes, it was a terrible idea. But you try saying no to a guy with a banjo and a dream.
Here’s the truth: I don’t know how long this will last. Rents go up. Algorithms change. Attention spans shrink. But every time someone walks in and says, “This place smells like my childhood,” I know we’re doing something right.
I’m not building an empire here. I’m building a corner. A haven. A stubborn little space where stories still matter, and people still look each other in the eye.
