As the owner of Park Road Books, Sally Brewster buys and sells thousands of books every year. She also reads as many as she can. “Five books a week, on average,” Brewster says, smiling slyly as customers within earshot express shock at her claim.She insists she’s not exaggerating, despite her busy life as owner of Charlotte’s oldest independent bookstore. “My husband does the cooking. I don’t care what the house looks like. I don’t care what the garden looks like…. I read all the time.”
Brewster, 61, bought Park Road Books in 2003 from the late John Barringer, who had owned the store since its 1977 opening (then called Little Professor Book Center) in Charlotte’s iconic Park Road Shopping Center. She had been managing the store for Barringer since 1999, and “he always wanted me to buy the store, but that’s when competition was fierce—Borders, Barnes & Noble, Media Play, seven other indies in Charlotte—so I told him I would see how it went…It took me that long to get the financing.”
Until recently, with the opening of Troubadour Booksellers in east Charlotte, Park Road Books was the city’s only indie bookstore. Its inviting storefront comprises three huge windows, divided into nine squares each, for displaying books and author photographs. Each month, the entryway bulletin board and online newsletter are filled with events, including book club meetings with themes, such as the Banned Book Club, the Geek Book Club, and the Foodie Book Club.
Devoted fans regularly pack the back of the store, sitting arm-to-arm on folding chairs and the comfy sofa or standing among the bookshelves for author talks and book signings. Indeed, the sofa, with its book-themed upholstery, was a gift from a customer. It just happened to match the store’s two upholstered armchairs, which are popular seats for book lovers. Other regular clients have donated rocking chairs (adult size and child-size), and one customer brings a cheeseball for the staff every Christmas season. “Some families we’ve known for four generations,” Brewster says. “We’re on hugging and kissing and crying terms. People bring us their babies. They bring us their puppies. We’re sort of an extended family.”
A graduate of Appalachian State University with a bachelor’s degree in history, Brewster started her career as a sales representative for Random House. For ten years, she regularly called on Barringer and other independent bookstore owners in the Carolinas and Georgia.Today, as the bookstore owner, she meets with five sales reps and does all the book buying, except for children’s books. She leaves that to Sherri Smith, one of the store’s 12 staffers. Those employees, including Brewster’s younger brother and general manager James Brewster, keep the store open every day of the year except for Easter, Thanksgiving and Christmas. “You can’t sell books if you’re not open,” she says.
Employees are also responsible for a popular feature at the front of the store–a section of shelves displaying books of staff recommendations. Fiction sells best, Brewster says, but “there’s something for everybody. I’m not going to judge you. I’m just glad people are reading.” Although she loves to read and sell books, Brewster has never been interested in writing one. She says her husband, Frazer Dobson, who writes horror stories, teases her about not wanting to be an author. “I am not a writer at all,” she says. “In the time it takes to write anything, I can read a heckuva lot of good books.”
In part to give herself more time to read, Brewster assigns responsibility for organizing the popular author talks to another staffer, Halli Gomez. Guest authors have ranged from nationally known celebrities, such as Pat Conroy, Jimmy Carter, and Anne Rice, to popular local writers, such as Kathy Reichs, Judy Goldman, and Tommy Tomlinson.
Brewster is proud to have survived challenges from chain stores and online booksellers and from the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020 and 2021. She credits a $45,000 grant from the federal Paycheck Protection Program for enabling her to pay employees and keep the store operating during the pandemic. Even though she closed the store for in-store customers, it kept going with online and over-the-phone sales. “The phone rang off the hook,” Brewster says. She’s also proud that she covers health insurance premiums, including dental and vision, for employees; partners with Communities in Schools, which provides hundreds of books to Mecklenburg County children; and pays taxes that support the local community.
The mention of taxes brings up Amazon, the popular online bookseller and nemesis of independent bookstores, owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos. For years, Amazon wasn’t required to collect or pay state sales taxes, giving it a competitive advantage over bricks-and-mortar stores. Amazon claimed it shouldn’t have to pay taxes because doing so would be administratively burdensome and unfair because the online business, without a physical presence, didn’t directly benefit from tax-funded services. That changed in February 2020 with a new N.C. law requiring online marketplaces, such as Amazon, to collect and remit sales taxes to the state.
Brewster asks authors who want her to sell their books in her store to agree not to mention Amazon in promotional materials. The suggested alternate wording is “books available in stores and online.” Customers who purchase books from independent bookstores are supporting more than the stores, Brewster says. They also help retain work for local authors, lawyers, accountants, printers, banks, and other vendors. “Every time you buy from a corporate entity,” she says, “you’re sending money out of the community.”
Reach Park Road Books: www.parkroadbooks.com; 704-525-9239
Three Questions for Sally Brewster:
Favorite book: “It’s hard to pinpoint a favorite. The one I’ve read five times is A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.”
Favorite bookstore besides your own: “I don’t really go to a lot of other bookstores.”
Bookstore dog: Yola, a small brown dog and familiar presence at the store for many years, died Jan. 25, 2025. “She was my baby. I spent more time with her than anyone,” Brewster says. But in 2026, she welcomed a new bookstore dog, Myfanwy (sounds like Tiffany), named after the protagonist in Daniel O’Malley’s 2012 sci-fi thriller, The Rook.
Karen Garloch will discuss her debut novel, Stray Voltage, at Park Road Books, 4139 Park Road, Charlotte, NC, on Oct. 28, from 6:30-7:30 p.m.
Karen Garloch spent forty-five years as a newspaper reporter in Ohio and North Carolina, including thirty years at the Charlotte Observer, where she was a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Local Reporting. Her debut novel, Stray Voltage, won the 2024 Petrichor Prize for Finely Crafted Fiction from Regal House Publishing. A native of Indiana, she graduated from Ball State University, where she is a member of the Journalism Hall of Fame. She and her husband live in Charlotte, North Carolina.
