We Launched a Bookstore; We Found Community

Spontaneous third spaces are what we all need

To celebrate the release of The Parisian Heist, I’m offering a live masterclass on June 30th at noon ET with Maureen Wiley where we’ll talk about everything I’ve learned over the course of writing more than ten books. How I edit, how I create an ensemble of characters, great beginnings and bangers of endings. Plus how to find and choose an agent.

This one will be an hour long with plenty of time for Q&A and the only price of admission is that you buy the book.

» REGISTER HERE «

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A couple of weeks ago my kids set up a lemonade stand outside our row house in Philly. It was 94 degrees and they were killing it.

After a couple of hours, though, they started to get bored. A few neighborhood kids came by and asked if they wanted to play inside and the stand was abandoned. Rather than let a perfectly good folding table go to waste, Nick and I grabbed our Bookcase Books signage, hauled out a stack of summer reads and set up a pop-up bookstore right there on the sidewalk.

Y’all, it was wonderful.

In the next two hours we sold heaps of books, but that wasn’t the best part.

We met dozens of neighbors we had never met before despite living on adjacent blocks. People stopped to browse and ended up staying to talk for at least fifteen minutes. Readers started discussing books they loved and books they hated right there on our stoop. One woman picked up a novel and another passerby immediately launched into an impassioned argument about why the ending was terrible. At one point two readers were flirting over a stack of smutty paperbacks and I think they exchanged numbers.

The kids eventually drifted back outside, confused about why their abandoned lemonade stand had become a bookstore, but not so confused that they didn’t start hawking kids’ books.

I met a curator from the Philly Museum of Art and we started chatting about a Parisian Heist event. We debated congressional candidates with a community board member and then found out how to attend our community board meetings.

I got recommendations for both Botox and a dentist.

It was just a folding table covered with books on a hot afternoon and somehow it became a spontaneous third space for joy, conversation and community.

We’re constantly hearing about America’s loneliness epidemic. We read endless stories about how people have fewer friends, how they don’t know their neighbors, how community organizations are disappearing and how we’re all spending more time online and less time together. We talk about the problem a lot, but we rarely talk about what actually brings people together.

I was at a dinner last night with a delightfully bookish group to celebrate the launch of my friend Chassity’s book Pink Sand Summer (more on that tomorrow). And we started talking about this hunger for community. Someone pointed out this story in the WSJ about young people flocked to church to find one another.

Our table of books gave strangers permission to talk to each other. People stopped because books are one of the last things we can discuss with strangers without immediately descending into politics, tribalism or rage.

When Nick and I started Bookcase Books, we thought we were building a bookstore. We certainly didn’t think we were in the community-building business.

What happened that day on Pine Street happens almost every time we pop up, whether it’s a table at a brewery or with our little book trailer in the Catskills.

People come for the books, but they stay for the conversations. They come looking for a novel and leave having met a neighbor. Amidst all the madness of the news cycle and the world this is what is bringing me hope!