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Scott Lambridis

Henderson Books: A Marriage Built Out of Books

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by Scott Lambridis

Henderson Books in Bellingham is the best used bookstore I’ve ever encountered, full stop. The volume and selection are unmatched. I’ve never made it through the fiction stacks in a single visit. On my last trip, I lingered far too long among the largest collection of Fay Weldon books I’ve ever seen, and it’s one of the only places I’ve been able to slowly piece together the hilariously philosophical Grooks volumes by Danish poet Piet Hein. A friend in the Bay Area once flew up to Bellingham on a pilgrimage, only to find the store closed for vacation—possibly for the first time in a decade.

But if you were to linger after hours and overhear a conversation between the owners, you’d likely see Robert, who founded the store, looking around at the towering shelves and saying something he’s apparently been saying for decades. “Let’s just quit.”

His wife Barbara—his partner in the store and in life—answers the way she always has. “No quitting.”

It sounds like a joke, but it’s also the operating philosophy behind one of the most remarkable used bookstores in the Pacific Northwest: a labyrinth of some 350,000 used books, stacked floor to ceiling in narrow aisles that feel both carefully negotiated and slightly contested.

“He wanted the aisles narrower,” she once said. “I wanted them wider. I got my way, mostly.”

Their partnership is written directly into the store.

Before Henderson Books existed, Robert lived something closer to a wandering reader’s life. In the 1950s and ’60s he drifted around the country, sometimes riding freight trains, rarely staying anywhere long. He never finished school, but he read constantly, buying books at garage sales because they were the only thing he could afford.

One day he sold a book back to a store and was startled by how much they paid him. The realization stuck: you could make a life out of books.

For years he followed a pattern: working for a while, saving money, quitting, reading, and occasionally opening small used bookstores that would last until a landlord or neighborhood change pushed him somewhere else. Bellingham was not supposed to be permanent. When he arrived in the mid-1980s, he brought what he called “the best fifty boxes” from a closing shop in Seattle and opened a small used bookstore downtown. Then a woman walked in. She was looking for a book.

They married around 1990. She kept her job at the post office for a time, but eventually joined him full time in the store. When Henderson Books moved into its current building in 1994, they built the shelves together with help from woodworking friends who practically lived in the space for months. The boards all still show their planer marks.

The design philosophy has remained simple: let the books create the atmosphere. There are no reading couches, no coffee bars, no decorative flourishes competing for attention.

Just books. A lot of them.

Running a used bookstore that size is not romantic work. Inventory arrives in unpredictable waves. Sections expand and contract. Entire walls slowly migrate outward as the collection grows. Through all of it, their roles have remained remarkably consistent. Robert brings the instinct of a lifelong reader. His rule is simple: never assume a book is valuable (or worthless) until you’ve looked closely.

His wife brings something else: steadiness. Over the years, whenever Robert has suggested closing the shop, she has answered the same way. “No quitting.”

Which is why Henderson Books still stands today, forty years after it began, less a business plan than a long-running conversation between two people who built a life, and an extraordinary store, out of the same stubborn promise, a promise, thankfully, still being kept.

Scott Lambridis

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 

Gramercy Books and the Quiet Revival of Columbus Bookselling

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By Scott Lambridis

I lived in Columbus for six years after college. It’s where I met my wife, where I played in a band, and where I first got serious about writing—serious enough to start a small press of my own. So when I spoke with Linda Kass of Gramercy Books, I assumed I knew what kind of bookstore landscape she was describing. 

I didn’t.

Gramercy opened in 2016, long after I’d left town, in Bexley, an inner-ring suburb just east of downtown Columbus. Kass, a writer herself, had spent nine years running a community reading program that brought national authors to the area. When a new building went up on Main Street, directly across from the Bexley Public Library, she saw the opportunity clearly: a bookstore shaped by her own sense of what a literary space could be. A woman-owned store in a community that hadn’t had a bookstore since 1978.

outside view of Gramercy Books

Listening to Kass, I realized Gramercy is part of something larger: not the decline of bookstore culture—the story we’ve all been told for years—but a local revival. 

As Kass put it, “We have this corner where we celebrate reading.”  

When Gramercy opened, Columbus already had one famous holdout, The Book Loft in German Village, with its thirty-odd rooms and cultish following. But now, Kass said, there are around fifteen bookstores in the greater Central Ohio area, each serving a different community. She sees that not as competition, but as evidence that something real is happening. “That should be celebrated,” she said. “That means people are reading.”

Gramercy’s own contribution to that revival is deliberate. The store feels elegant but welcoming: dark wood shelves, strong signage, a bright white children’s room that makes up nearly a third of both the store’s footprint and sales. Next door, a bakery and coffee shop shares the space through barn doors, encouraging customers to drift between books and conversation. The pairing was intentional. Kass had seen similar models work elsewhere—bookstores creating small ecosystems of complementary businesses—and wanted to build that kind of cross-traffic into Gramercy.

Gramercy Books

What gives the place its energy, though, is its events program. Gramercy hosts about one event a week, sometimes in-store, sometimes off-site when crowds grow beyond the shop’s sixty-seat capacity. Kass curates a mix that ranges widely: haiku poets, romance discussions, national novelists, music-and-book pairings, even large events at an indie film theater or live music venue nearby. For her, the point is connection. Author events, she said, create a “far deeper relationship” between books, writers, and readers.

That sense of relationship shows up everywhere. The staff, Kass said, are “the heart of the store.” They’re knowledgeable, welcoming, and attentive enough to call customers when a book comes in they know they’ll love. In a low-margin business, that kind of care doesn’t come easily. Gramercy now offers health and retirement benefits, something Kass took pride in building toward over time. 

Asked what explains the store’s success, she gave a simple answer: “We just try to do everything well.”

That may also describe what’s happening across Columbus right now. Not flashy, not nostalgic, and not accidental. Just a growing network of stores, each rooted in its own corner, suggesting that the old narrative of literary decline was never the only one.

When I returned to Columbus this summer after nearly twenty years away, I could sense some of that shift—not just in bookstores, but in the city itself, in its pockets of creative space and unexpected gems. Something more confident, more self-defined. Gramercy feels like part of that story now. 

Scott Lambridis

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 

Dog Eared Books: The Store That Always Has the Right Book

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By Scott Lambridis

Around 2005, a young kid named Cassius tried to steal a graphic novel from Dog Eared Books in San Francisco’s Mission District. He slipped the book under his jacket and headed for the door, but a bookseller caught him. The kid burst into tears. Ryan, who has worked at the store for more than twenty years, still remembers the moment. They scolded the kid. They made it clear he couldn’t do that. And then they gave him the book.

These days Cassius is grown—“a tall, handsome adult,” Ryan told me—but he still drops by the shop when he visits his mom. It’s a small story, but it says a lot about Dog Eared Books, a small store, packed tightly into a corner of Valencia Street. It’s warm, human, a little chaotic, and inseparable from its neighborhood. That reflection of the neighborhood is why they always seem to have exactly the right book. 

For a few years, I took part in a monthly book club devoted to NYRB Classics, hosted by Dog Eared. They always had a dedicated shelf to the Classics series, but more than that, the shelves always held unexpected delights: European novellas, lost modernists, odd little translations that felt unlikely to be found anywhere else. Ryan explained the secret:  “The books we have on the shelves reflect the community.”

Most of Dog Eared’s used inventory comes directly from the Mission’s readers, people bringing in the books they’ve finished or no longer have room for. The result is a kind of literary ecosystem. The neighborhood supplies the raw material. The booksellers shape it. Dog Eared has always leaned into that treasure-hunting culture. From the beginning, the store blended used books with new titles and remainders—publisher overstock discovered through the kinds of scavenger hunts booksellers love. “You have to enjoy looking for treasure if you work at a used bookstore,” Ryan said.

But the real work is curation. With such a small footprint, nearly every book has to earn its place. “Ninety percent of the job is picking the right books,” Ryan told me. Luckily, San Francisco gives them the freedom to take risks. “It’s a literate city. Thank goodness.” Just as important, the store avoids the trap that sinks many used bookstores: snobbery. “We’ve done a pretty good job not being jerks,” Ryan said with a laugh.

The result is a place that’s tidy enough to browse, adventurous enough to surprise you, and welcoming enough that even a kid caught stealing comes back, year after year after year. Our NYRB Classics book club has since gone online as members moved to other locales, and the store has changed owners, but whenever I’m in San Francisco, Dog Eared is still the first place I go. It’ll no doubt have exactly the book I didn’t know I was looking for.

Scott Lambridis

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 

Borderlands Books: The Store Its Readers Refused to Lose

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by Scott Lambridis

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

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 

Fabulosa Books: The Castro’s Living Room

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by Scott Lambridis

A young man from Texas walked into Fabulosa Books, looked at the wall of queer titles, and started crying. “Is this all gay stuff?” he asked. When an employee named Becka told him yes, the young man asked if he could hug her. Moments like that, owner Alvin Orloff says, are why the bookstore exists. “People are traumatized,” he told me. “It’s really important for them to be able to buy queer stuff in public and see it all there.” 

Fabulosa Books sits on Castro Street, in the space once occupied by A Different Light, the legendary queer bookstore that helped anchor the neighborhood through the AIDS crisis. When that store closed in 2011, the Castro went five years without a bookstore at all.

Orloff had been working for years at Dog Eared Books on Valencia Street, one of San Francisco’s beloved literary hubs. I first met him there when he hosted a monthly NYRB Classics book club I was part of. In 2016 he helped open a Dog Eared branch in the old A Different Light location, bringing a bookstore back to the Castro—and bringing with it the kind of literary curation he loved: small presses, forgotten classics, and books that would never appear in an airport kiosk. 

Then, in 2019, at the release party for Orloff’s own memoir, his boss leaned over and made an offer. Did he want to buy the store? Orloff said yes. Then the pandemic shut everything down. “I was leaving the house to go file the papers,” he said, laughing. “And City Hall closed.”

For a while, the idea stalled. Castro Street, he says, was “dead, dead, dead.” But two years later, staring down his 60th birthday, he decided to go for it. “Now or never,” he said. “I’ve got to become a bookstore magnate.”

In 2021 he bought the store and renamed it Fabulosa Books. At first, the shop wasn’t especially LGBTQ-focused. But after the 2016 election and a noticeable shift in national rhetoric, Orloff began expanding the store’s queer inventory. What started as maybe 10 or 15 percent of the stock grew to more than half.

“The more homophobic society becomes,” he said, “the more people circle the wagons and reclaim their identities.” Today, the store’s identity is unmistakable. The LGBTQ section greets visitors right at the front door. The space itself is bright and airy—more open than Dog Eared’s famously packed Valencia shop—with local art on the walls and a small corner of stickers, buttons, and postcards for tourists or anyone who wants a keepsake they can slip into a carry-on.

Fabulosa has to wear two hats at once: the Castro’s queer bookstore and its only general neighborhood bookstore. That means stocking everything from queer memoirs to popular fiction to obscure literary gems. Orloff doesn’t mind the balancing act. “You can’t take your parents to the gay bar,” he said. “But you can bring them to the bookstore.” Couples wander in on dates. Tourists make pilgrimages after reading Tales of the City. Parents sometimes bring newly out kids. “They come in slightly freaked out,” he said, “and leave slightly less freaked out.” 

That moment between Becka and the young man from Texas helped spur her to start Books Not Bans, a nonprofit hosted by Fabulosa that sends banned books to LGBTQ+ organizations in conservative areas.

The business realities remain challenging—rents, online shopping, the shrinking culture of public literary events—but Orloff approaches it with both realism and humor. “I’m not in charge of whether people want a robust literary culture,” he said. “What I can do is make this bookstore as appealing as I possibly can.”

Some things carry forward. “We still do NYRB Classics,” he told me. “We’ve got a shelf.” It’s one of those quiet throughlines from the book club I knew at Dog Eared to the store he runs now.

In a neighborhood built on visibility, Fabulosa has become exactly what the Castro has always needed.  Like it was for that young man from Texas, it’s more than a shop. It’s a place where you can browse, talk books, and maybe recognize someone else who understands why it matters.

Scott Lambridis

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 

Kepler’s Books: Building a Bookstore Around Its People

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by Scott Lambridis

Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park has the reputation of an institution. Founded in the 1950s by peace activist Roy Kepler, it was once a gathering place for Beat thinkers, Stanford students, and even early performances by the Grateful Dead.

But when I sat down with Community Engagement Officer (CEO) Praveen Madan last year, that history wasn’t what stayed with me most. What stood out was a simple idea: Kepler’s isn’t trying to build the best bookstore around books. It’s trying to build the best bookstore around its people.

When Praveen first became involved with Kepler’s, he came from the corporate world and had never run a bookstore before. The store had faced closure before—most dramatically in 2005, when news of the shutdown sparked protests and drew thousands into the plaza outside.

By the time Praveen arrived in late 2011, the situation was quieter but no less urgent. The board had again decided to close the store, this time before the news had spread publicly. What followed wasn’t a public outcry, but months of behind-the-scenes work: restructuring debts, raising funds, and reimagining what the bookstore could be. The message, even then, was clear: this place mattered.

Soon Praveen found himself stepping into the vacuum of leadership. “There wasn’t really an owner,” he told me. “They just expected me to run it.”

What followed was less a rescue than a reinvention.

Praveen believes the real competitive advantage of an independent bookstore isn’t price, inventory size, or logistics. It’s the staff. “Our biggest asset is our people,” he explained. The booksellers are the first line of curation—the people who decide what appears on the shelves and what gets recommended to readers.

And at Kepler’s, that curation shows. Though the store itself isn’t enormous, almost every shelf intrigues: literature in translation, unusual small-press titles, books about nonviolence or sustainability, unexpected staff picks.

Praveen described a constant gravitational pull in bookselling. If you’re not careful, the catalogs of the biggest publishers can quietly take over your shelves. “They have the big sales teams, the big titles,” he said. “If you’re not paying attention, the Big Five will consume your store.” Kepler’s fights that gravity intentionally, highlighting independent presses, diverse voices, and books that might otherwise be overlooked.

One bookseller, Jasmine, described their approach this way: they feature “not the sparkly famous person book for kids, the beautiful one that you’ll love in 50 years.”

They pay attention to what people want, but also to what they believe people might need. A good bookstore finds the balance between both. Each year they even publish a holiday list of 80 staff recommendations, a customer favorite.

But building a staff capable of that kind of curation requires something bookstores have historically struggled to offer: decent wages.

So Kepler’s made an unusual decision. Instead of maximizing profit, they decided to maximize wages. The store aims to devote roughly 35% of its revenue to staff compensation, far higher than the industry norm.

To make that work, they experimented with creative solutions: a voluntary living-wage surcharge, a membership program, and perhaps most significantly, a structural innovation. Kepler’s spun off its extensive author-events program into a nonprofit—the Kepler’s Literary Foundation—so the bookstore itself wouldn’t have to subsidize those events with retail profits.

The result is a hybrid model that has drawn attention from bookstores across the country, and the Reimagine Bookstores campaign, which Praveen helps lead.

Standing in the store, watching customers browse shelves curated by booksellers who love what they do and feel well-supported, the logic seems obvious. If you want a great bookstore, you start by taking care of its people. 

Scott Lambridis

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 

Green Apple Books: A Thousand Small Improvements

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by Scott Lambridis

I arrived at Green Apple Books as they were opening for the day. Staff were rolling carts of sale books onto Clement Street, those irresistible sidewalk stacks I had to convince myself to ignore. 

Inside, the store feels a little like an oversized San Francisco apartment that somehow kept expanding over the years. The floors change beneath your feet. Hallways narrow and widen. Odd-sized stairs appear and disappear. The layout twists and turns in multiple dimensions, unified only by the bookshelves and, perched high on top, a dizzying array of art and strange artifacts. There’s a sense that if you turned away for a moment, something might shift.

Pete Mulvihill, one of the store’s owners, led me through the maze. We settled into a pair of chairs upstairs in the philosophy section, appropriately under reconstruction. Green Apple is, at its core, the result of steady adaptation. 

The original owner opened the shop while working for United Airlines, running it only on weekends at first. “This used to be an apartment,” Pete told me. “He just gutted it and put in bookshelves. Cut a hole in the wall.” Over time, the store expanded into neighboring spaces, something that would be far harder to do today. 

From the beginning, the philosophy was to respond to readers. “Sell more of what’s selling,” Pete said, recalling the founder’s advice. 

But that instinct has always been in tension with something else: curation.

“Bad books hide good books,” he said.

Green Apple is legendary among hardcore readers for its collection. Every time I visit, the shelves overflow with titles from my to-read list, and even the briefest of browsing yields new gems. Featured sections like Customer Favorites, the Green Apple Hall of Fame, and 50 Years of Green Apple show the glory of not just their lineage but the taste of the curators. 

That’s the point. If you have to sift through noise to find something worthwhile, the whole experience breaks down. 

That balance between responsiveness and discernment is shaped as much by economics as by taste.

Books have fixed prices. Margins are thin. Rent and labor costs in San Francisco are a constant challenge. “If publishers gave us five percent more,” Pete said, “there’d be twice as many bookstores.” And Amazon, of course, is always there, training customers to expect speed and discounts that independent stores simply can’t match. 

So survival comes down to all the other decisions. 

Used books help, though they require more labor, each one bought, evaluated, and priced by hand. Staff curate deeply, sometimes sourcing titles from overseas or working directly with tiny publishers. “We’ll go out of our way for something special,” Pete said. “Even if I have to put it on a credit card.” 

The store also thinks beyond the transaction. Pete helped found San Francisco’s “Local First” initiative, built around a simple idea: shopping locally keeps money circulating locally. Studies showed that roughly 62% of a bookstore purchase stays in the community—compared to effectively none with Amazon. Green Apple has leaned into that ethos, supporting neighborhood events, street improvements, and the kind of independent commercial fabric that Clement Street still manages to sustain.

And then there are the thousand small experiments. 

Some are subtle, such as shifting shelf space, refining sections, adjusting inventory. Others are more direct. Pete described one recent success: “a staff member suggested ‘dad-style’ baseball caps, and they sold so quickly that we ended up ordering 1,000. It’s fun spotting them out in the world.”

Events are another piece of the equation. While the Clement Street store hosts smaller readings, much of Green Apple’s programming now happens at its second location across Golden Gate Park, a space designed to hold larger crowds. For even bigger events, they’ll even go offsite. As a result, the store can host everything from intimate conversations to major literary events such as a feature with Ocean Vuong. Sometimes things get weirder. Pete told me about one appearance by Dave Eggers, who once offered relationship advice from a booth. On another occasion, he gave haircuts to a couple of brave volunteers.

“That big event pays for the little poetry reading where two people buy a book,” Pete said.

It’s all part of the same system: a store constantly adjusting, constantly redistributing energy from one part of the business to another.

“It’s the opposite of death by a thousand cuts,” Pete said. “It’s a thousand little improvements.”

It’s the perfect description. Not just of how Green Apple survives, but of how it feels to walk through it. 

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