For years, a man named Michael came into Borderlands Books in San Francisco. He lived in residential hotels and worked occasionally as a book scout, finding used books to sell around the city. He loved science fiction, especially Fritz Leiber, and he liked to talk about it. Sometimes at length.
Jeremy Lassen, who has worked at Borderlands for nearly three decades, remembers Michael clearly. The store’s cat would often curl into his lap while he sat reading quietly in the corner.
Then one day a letter arrived. Michael had moved to Florida and learned he had a brain tumor. In the letter he apologized if he had ever behaved strangely in the store. But mostly he wanted to say thank you. Being able to sit in Borderlands with a book and a cat in his lap, he wrote, had been one of the most important things in his life during that time.
Before Borderlands was a bookstore people rallied to save, it was a place that made room for people like Michael. The store began in 1997 when Alan Beatts, a lifelong science fiction reader, looked around the Bay Area and decided the genre deserved a better kind of bookstore. Many independents at the time still carried the cluttered aesthetic of the 1970s: dim lighting, dusty shelves, books stacked wherever they would fit.
Beatts imagined something else: a clean, well-lit, carefully organized bookstore devoted entirely to science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Jeremy met him while working at another indie bookstore in the Bay Area. After months of showing up every Sunday as a customer, Beatts finally told him, “You’re in here all the time anyway—want a job?”
He’s been there ever since.
From the beginning, Borderlands made a few deliberate choices. The store would stay focused on books. No figurines, toys, or novelty merchandise competing for shelf space. It would skip media tie-ins and franchise novels entirely. If a book didn’t stand on its own as literature, it didn’t belong.
“That shelf space could be more books,” Jeremy told me.
The store’s atmosphere reflects the same philosophy. Wooden fixtures, vintage rugs, and refinished hardwood floors give it a quiet, crafted feel with much of the work done by Beatts himself. The effect is welcoming but serious, a place designed for readers rather than collectors of memorabilia.
But survival in San Francisco has required more than good taste. Borderlands has been forced to move several times as landlords changed and rents rose. At one point, a minimum wage increase threatened to close the store entirely. When Beatts explained the numbers, customers responded with a simple question: could they help? They could. A few hundred patrons began contributing a few hundred dollars a year. It became enough to sustain the store for the next decade.
More recently, the community helped again. After years of lease instability, Borderlands borrowed the money to purchase its own building, not from a commercial bank but from readers who wanted the store to remain. It’s fitting that their logo is the ouroboros. Like the snake eating its own tail, there’s a recursive continuity at Borderlands, where customers sustain the store that, in turn, sustains them in a perpetual cycle of renewal. It also makes Michael’s story feel less like an anecdote than an explanation. A bookstore that gives people a place to belong will eventually find that it belongs to them, too.
Scott Lambridis is a novelist based in Bellingham, Washington. A former indie press founder, performance series organizer, olive farmer, and progressive rocker, he studied neurobiology at the University of Virginia, earned an MFA from San Francisco State University, and read a book from every country in the world. His debut novel, St. Ulphia’s Dead, is forthcoming from Regal House Publishing on July 7, 2026. Learn more at scottlambridis.com
