Opening Nov. 15, 2024!

That’s just around the corner!

It feels like I’ve been heading toward this moment since visiting my first Scholastic Book Fair, probably around 1990.

I’m opening a bookshop! It legitimately doesn’t seem real still. Or maybe my brain isn’t even equipped to consider it real.

And it’s very real. The company exists. The first box of stock (books!) is sitting over near one of my personal bookshelves. It’s happening.

Books have been my life — my whole freaking life — for as long as I’ve been able to read them. Way back when, I got in trouble for sprinting through the bowling alley to retrieve my copy of Green Eggs and Ham, the first book I learned to read.

I knew there was no running allowed in the bowling alley! I couldn’t imagine losing that book though, and I was willing to not just disobey the rules, but totally destroy them to get that book back. That’s what books meant to me then and still do to this day. I’ll sprint for them — which is really saying something.

Fast forward through at least 10, maybe 15 Scholastic Book Fairs to the time when a friend asked me if I’d ever been to Barnes & Noble. I hadn’t! I didn’t even know what it was. At that point it wasn’t the Big Bad Wolf (so, obviously, it also was about a decade from being dethroned by You Know Who).

That Barnes & Noble supplied me with probably over 300 books through the years. It eventually moved. But I found another one in another city — that city was Fort Wayne, Indiana. So I traveled there regularly. It’s where I got my first full set of the Dune novels by Frank Herbert.

The truth is, after learning I loved books as a young kid, every kind of bookstore became the kind I wanted to visit. Every place with books, even. If a grocery store had books, well, let’s head into that place to see those books!

Even when the newest and Biggest Baddest Wolf opened up a physical location in Chicago, I went. Out of curiosity, sure, but mostly because of books.

BECAUSE OF BOOKS!

But a good bookstore is more than just huge amounts of books and low prices. A good bookstore feels like one. It’s a little hard to define what makes a bookstore feel special, but I’ve been to a lot of them at this point and I think I can try to explain the traits that can add up to creating a memorable bookstore.

There are two quotes from the film You’ve Got Mail that perfectly sum up my experience with bookstores and books in general, but also help me arrive at what I want my bookstore to be.

First, from the Suit with a cash register for a brain and a bottom line instead of a heart, Joe Fox:

“I said we were a goddamn piazza! A place in the city where people can mingle and mix and be!”

And next, from lover of the friendliest flower and staunch Joni Mitchell devotee Kathleen Kelly:

When you read a book as a child it becomes a part of your identity in a way that no other reading in your whole life does…

Joe Fox, as portrayed by Tom Hanks, is describing the bookstore he was born into owning, the big bad Fox Books. It’s comical, but it’s also not wrong to want that from your bookstore. He does focus on how they stock 150,000 titles - which can be good, but is not necessary - and he is too focused on selling “cheap” books.

Kathleen Kelly, played by Meg Ryan, on the other hand, is also referring to the bookstore she inherited, The Shop Around the Corner. She sort of inadvertently implies that if you didn’t read as a child, you’re screwed, and that all reading as a “non-child” is inferior or at least not as powerful.

And, yes, these “takes” are purposely spoken by characters who meet up later and realize their idiosyncrasies (failings?) complement each other’s. But there is some truth inside these misguided concepts.

A good bookstore will feel like a piazza. It will match people up with the stories that define them now, no matter their age, and also on into their lives.

More often than not, when I walk into a bookstore I can feel that “piazza” feeling if it’s there. I want to help others find that feeling. And I want them to find the books that tell them life-changing stories, and to know this:

All reading brings with it the possibility of changing you, of redefining your life, and it doesn’t matter how old you are. And the more reading you do, the more chances you’ll have at understanding yourself, and hopefully others too.

That’s what Moss Heart means to me. That’s what I’m setting out to do.

And I’m so excited to recommend a book (or four) to you!

-austin