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Much of my debut novel, Storybook Ending, takes place in a Seattle neighborhood bookstore—one which bears, shall we say, an uncanny resemblance to Third Place Books in Ravenna. The story is a comedy of manners centering around a note left in a book that finds the wrong recipient. I set the story there because it’s my own neighborhood bookstore, and because I’ve spent so many delicious hours there since it opened more than 20 years ago.
If you’re lucky enough to have an indie bookstore near your home, you might have a similar attachment to the place. For those of us who love to read, bookstores are magical: havens of endless possibility, smelling faintly of paper and coffee and stories. A favorite comment I’ve gotten from readers is that they see their own bookstores in the novel’s descriptions of Read the Room. (It’s very much the Ravenna Third Place Books, though, and populated with an entirely fictional staff. No real-life booksellers were harmed in the making of this book!)
In the Seattle area, we’re fortunate to have a rich independent bookstore scene. Seattle Independent Bookstore Day featured 29 stores this year, several of which—Elliott Bay Book Company and Left Bank Books in Seattle, Eagle Harbor Books on Bainbridge Island (originally called Betty’s Books), and Island Books on Mercer Island—have been operating for more than 50 years. And that number doesn’t include the area’s multitude of secondhand bookstores, many of which have been around so long they feel like permanent, pleasantly cluttered fixtures.
For a story in The Seattle Times in 2023, I spoke to Walter Carr, the original owner of Elliott Bay Book Company. He told me that when they opened in 1973, the Seattle bookstore landscape was very different from today. Independent stores existed then, but most of them were antiquarian shops specializing in used or rare books. Many Seattleites bought their books at department stores like Frederick & Nelson or the Bon Marche, which had large book departments on their top floors, doing a brisk business in bestsellers. Elliott Bay was something unusual at the time: a full-service general bookstore with a vast selection of new titles.
Local Books
Seattle Met Book Club
October 29, 6pm at Barnes & Noble University District
Join the Seattle Met book club in person for a conversation with author Moira Macdonald.
Over the years, there’s been some churn on the bookstore scene, with many beloved Seattle businesses closing their doors, including Kay’s Bookmark at University Village (a casualty of the arrival of a vast Barnes & Noble a few doors away), Seattle Mystery Bookshop (the only local store specializing in crime fiction), and two shops founded by Michael Coy, Bailey-Coy Books on Capitol Hill and M Coy Books & Espresso downtown. But happily, numerous others have arrived in their place: large (Third Place Books at Lake Forest Park, opened in 1998), tiny (the jewel-like Madison Books, opened in 2018), and everything in between.
It’s not easy to make a go of it in the book business, where profit margins are small and online competitors ever-present. But things are looking up for independent bookstores: The American Booksellers Association reported that 323 new brick-and-mortar, pop-up, or mobile stores opened across the US last year, a 31 percent increase over the previous year. And here in Seattle, it was heartening to see that nearly every local indie survived the pandemic and is still selling books today—and, in at least one case, inspiring a novel. Visit your neighborhood bookstore this week and you’ll see plenty of stories, both on and off the shelves.