In Which We Buy a Bookstore
Yesterday we bought a bookstore. We are now the proud owners of Nooks, a wonderful little place on North Prince Street in Lancaster.
I’m stunned. Nervous. Excited. Amazed. Talk about The Surrender Experiment? This is it.
When I was around eight years old, we lived in an old farmhouse in the middle of hundreds of acres of cornfields, in Lancaster, PA. I was the tenth generation of my family to be born and raised in the area. There was an old Mennonite church and cemetery on the other side of the barely-two-lanes back road, and beyond that a stream, and beyond that anything we could imagine. My Amish friend Daniel and I would ford the stream and explore the distant, abandoned mill, build dams in the creek and fish until the sun went down and the solitary light in the church parking lot winked on. Then I ran home through the thick summer dusk.
That whole farm was paradise for a boy my age with plenty of old nooks to explore and barns to wander through and shadows at dusk to conceal every manner of terrifying thing. If you want to know what that farmhouse was like, read my novel The Day the Angels Fell—the home of the protagonist is basically that old farm, where I grew up.
And it was around then that my mother started taking me to the Ridgeview Bookstore on Ridgeview Road, just outside of Intercourse, PA. On many dog days of summer, my mom would round up me and my younger sister, drive the three miles or so to the store, and peruse the aisles of that small but magical place. It was there I discovered the Sugar Creek Gang, bought most of The Hardy Boys books, and even started reading the books my mom bought, those old western romances. Oh, and also the Black Stallion series.
We would take our precious new book or two back to the un-air conditioned farmhouse and Mom would go back inside to vacuum or do laundry or clean the kitchen or work on binding quilt tops (that’s how she paid for our school clothes and probably our books, too), and I would get to sit out on the big front porch with an iced glass of meadow tea facing the two old oak trees and disappear into the world of thoroughbred racing or Sugar Creek or whatever the next mystery was that the Hardy Boys were tangled up in. The flies were terrible there in the summer, but I waved them away and sat there sweating, turning page after page after page.
At night it was so hot in the house that I would turn on the old box fan in my room and dome a sheet over it, so that it puffed up with air, then lay inside that white bubble with nothing but a pillow, a flashlight, and a good book. I could have easily believed that was the entire universe, except my two large windows were open and I could hear the crickets chirping in the heat and the very occasional, lonely car drive up the back road. What I wouldn’t give to be that little boy in front of the fan again: the gentle caress of the wonderfully cool air, the safety and security of knowing my parents were in the next room, my only care what was going to happen next in my book.
Ridgeview Bookstore. That was where it all began. After that it was the bookstore at our church, where my parents paid $11.92 for The Chronicles of Narnia, a box set I still have with the price written on it in pencil. And then it was the library in my middle school, because who can afford to keep up with the voracious reading appetite of a middle schooler who sets their alarm to wake up early before school so they can finish the book they’re reading?
Books, books, books.
Books and bookstores have always played an outsized role in my life. We have several thousand books in our house, and a recent repairman, after going through our home, looked at me and said in a dry voice, “So I take it you like books?” I have several dozen to-be-read books on my nightstand (which doesn’t stop me from buying more). I married a writer, and we each are almost always working on writing one book or another.
And those stories I read as a kid, they shaped me. They formed me into the person I am today.
The things you’re reading are forming you, too, whether it’s a novel or a memoir or the newspaper or your Instagram reel. Those things are turning you into the person you’re going to be.
For years, Maile and I talked about one day owning a bookstore, what books we would carry, why we felt it would be such important work. We dreamed about recommending books to people and introducing kids to amazing stories, the kind that they would be reading for the very first time, books that would shape THEM for the rest of their lives, help them to fall in love with stories and beauty, encounter good and evil, and learn to love those who are different from them. Books they would go on to share with their kids.
And now it looks like we get to do that.
Just to fill you in, as I wrote in a previous post,
A few weeks ago, I saw in my Instagram reels a post someone had shared about a local bookstore that was closing its doors. After I saw the reel, I sent the post to Maile and said, “Want to buy a bookstore?”
I was mostly joking.
I was sure she would send me back some kind of shocked emoji with a comment about how we barely had time to get the kids to all of their activities as it was, without a business to run. I figured she would say, That would be amazing, wouldn’t it? but then we’d both go back to our normal lives.
She didn’t. Her reply was simply,
Yes, I do.
The bookstore we are moving into is adorable and magical and whimsical. We will carry mostly children’s books but also general market fiction and a very small amount of nonfiction that we love, plus lots of our daughter’s artwork.
The previous owner, Emma, has done an incredible job creating a community in and around the store, and it’s a huge honor that she’s entrusting us with this thing she poured herself into for the last many years.
Are we excited? Yes. Terrified? Yes. Concerned that we’re perhaps taking on too much when we already have busy lives and six children? Sort of, but we’ll figure it out.
Here’s the thing, though. Maile and I both believe strongly that you need to LIVE! We get one life. We’re so excited about this, and I don’t know how we could have turned it down and not spent the next long time wondering, What if we just had done it?
We believe in taking risks, yes, but more than that we believe in surrendering to the things that are placed in our path, things that line up with our desire and our calling and our talents and our passions. This fits the bill. We believe in saying YES to those kinds of things, and this is definitely one of those kinds of things.
I love this quote from Fr. Richard Rohr:
“To let each moment teach us, we must allow ourselves to be at least slightly stunned by it until it draws us inward and upward, toward a subtle experience of wonder.”
The moment is teaching us. So, we said yes, and now we’re being drawn inward and upward. We walked through each open door, all along the way. There was one point where I was tired of waiting and not sure we should do it and literally told Maile, “Let’s just text Emma right now and tell her it’s not going to happen. We’re not going to get the money, anyway. It’s not going to work out.” Moments away from a different path. Moments away from saying no. Moments away from not letting that moment teach me.
But in true Maile form, she smiled quietly and said, “Let’s just wait and see what happens.”
The bookstore is called Nooks, and it’s located at 112 North Prince Street in the city of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. We hope you’ll come by, visit with us, talk about life and your favorite books.
A few things we’d like you to know:
We’re planning to open the store on Thursday, May 3rd. But stay tuned on that. You can follow our Instagram page at Nooks for all the announcements.
If you live in the US and don’t have a small bookstore to call your own (even if you don’t live in Lancaster), feel free to get in touch with us to order your books! We’re happy to ship them to you, or you can pick them up at the store if you’re close by. We hope to have the website up and running soon.
We’re also planning a Grand Opening weekend May 17th - May 19th! Stay tuned for all the fun things taking place (including a book launch/reading with Lisa-Jo Baker and her beautiful memoir, It Wasn’t Roaring, It Was Weeping). More details on how to sign up for that soon!
Finally, follow us over at the Nooks Substack page! Eventually, we’ll use that space to talk about books and what’s going on at the store.
This is what I hope for in the future for our little bookstore.
Twenty years from now I’ll be 67. There will be a young person nearing thirty years old. They're looking around their house and stumble on an old copy of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. It’s worn, cover faded. They pick it up and start reading it, and the story takes them back to when they were just a kid, and someone recommended this book to them. It was in that moment that they fell in love with reading and books and words and stories.
Then they remember, for the first time in a while, that they first came across that book in a little bookstore in Lancaster, a place called Nooks, a place their mom or dad used to take them when they needed a break, or a breather, or a good book.
This is our dream now. It feels pretty incredible to be able to go for it.
Aaaand here’s me crying over that conclusion. What a beautiful and important new adventure.
Congratulations, Shawn and Maile!! I can't wait to visit and welcome you to the neighborhood!