Imagine a day in the far north in the deepest winter, when the sun only peeps above the horizon for a few hours and the temperature never gets above freezing – not even close. Snow and ice are piled higher than your head and sharp wind cuts through even the thickest winter coats. Everything is dark and cold. Then imagine that you come in out of that dark and cold to a warm and clean and well-lit bookstore, stocked with beautiful books in every category that you can imagine – and even some that you couldn’t have – waiting for you to take home to your fireside to keep you company through the long winter nights. You’ve just come to Title Wave Books in Anchorage, Alaska.
Title Wave started in 1991 and is now one of the largest bookstores in Alaska. I talked to Angela Libal, the current owner, who has been at Title Wave since 1998, about what makes Title Wave such a warm and inviting place. One of the key elements is the way in which Title Wave is responsive to the particular nature of Alaskan life. “Alaskans are very resilient and self-reliant,” Angela says, “and they want to be can-do, hands-on. If you don’t know how to do something, you figure out how to do it, or you find somebody that can do it. Winters are long, places are far away and remote. Logistics can be such that, you know, if you’re waiting on a library book that you’ve requested from your little community library, you might be waiting weeks or months.”
That feeling of being far away and remote isn’t just a feature of the winter, but is built into the Alaskan ethos that informs a special relationship with physical media like books. “I’ve helped customers in the store who say that they are off-grid,” Angela says, “intentionally off-grid, and that means no electricity. We’re talking a back-to-basics. You’ve probably heard Alaskans refer to the Lower 48. Or we also refer to it as Outside, with a capital O. Outside is not Alaska. So Outside, that might be viewed as perhaps primitive, but there is a back-to-basics feeling of independence that some people really ascribe as Alaska still being this last frontier, where they can carve out a living, they can build a cabin with their own hands, they can haul their own water, they can use solar energy and maybe they have a generator for the occasional DVD watching with their little television, but they’re not interested in the internet streaming or anything that comes with that, so they’re perfectly happy with their books and their physical media.”
Angela continues, “We had an author event last night, and the author was telling me that she and her husband have a home about an hour north of us in a farming community. [But] they have a cabin off-grid in one of the national parks, and that’s not an uncommon occurrence, where you have somebody who comes through town on a regular basis and they live on a small homestead, and they have a cabin in the wilderness. And there are things they like to do and things that they like to have with them, books being a really important integral part of that.”
That connection and responsiveness to the community also shows in the in-store events that Title Wave hosts, which focus on local authors and local interests. For example, a recent event featured local author Kristin Link “She’s a local science illustrator,” Angela says, “and she just had a book come out called Discover the Art of Field Sketching, and she was doing a book talk, but also a tutorial. We have the ability to hook up someone’s laptop to a projector, so she was able to do a guided demonstration and tutorial with us on how to do some nature sketching, and it was a fabulous event. It was super fun. She had brought with her a few found objects from nature. One was a little bracket fungus that grows off of a birch tree. And then she also had just a twig, but it had interesting lichen on it. And so finding the beauty in an object that you would maybe think of as ugly or just sort of dismiss because they’re all over the ground. How can we look at it and then translate that into maybe a nature journal? So that was a really fun event, and it was very well attended. She provided some basic supplies, but then we had paper. We had families with kids all the way up to retirees, so it was a really good all-age event.”
Catering to a wide variety of interests, especially among the iconoclasts that populate Alaska, means that Title Wave needs to stock an especially wide inventory.
“We have over 1,400 sections in the store,” Angela says. “So we’re able to really have unique categories. In our transportation section, we have planes, trains, automobiles, railroads, motorcycles, ships, boat, but then within each one of those, there’s a bunch of little subcategories. So there’s boat building, there’s navigation and seamanship, there’s pirate history, there’s exploration. So there’s all kinds of ways to really kind of hone in on a subject that you’re passionate about.”
For me, that is one of the things that makes Title Wave such a magical store. Browsing its shelves, I found strange, beautiful, and unusual books about things I had never even dreamed of searching for – books that I never would have imagined even existed. And even though ninety-five percent of Title Wave’s inventory is used, Angela and her team make sure that the books are in pristine condition. The fantastic selection is also a part of the connection between Title Wave and the Alaskan community around it. Because, as Angela notes, “We rely on our customers to be our suppliers,” the variety of titles reflects the tastes of people who pride themselves on being out-of-the-ordinary. People don’t live in Alaska because they want a run-of-the-mill life and the books they want reflect that. Browsing the shelves of Title Wave is an adventure in itself, but one that you can undertake while keeping warm while it is dark and cold outside.
Kathy Giuffre was born and raised in the Ozark mountains of Arkansas. She graduated from Harvard University and got a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of North Carolina. Her debut novel, The Drunken Spelunker’s Guide to Plato, won the Seven Sisters Book Award, was a SIBA Okra Pick, and was a finalist for the Foreward Indiefab Book of the Year. Her new novel, Armadillo Massacre Number Three, won the Petrichor Prize for Finely Crafted Fiction and is coming from Regal House in Fall 2027.
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