Strolling into Thank You Books in Birmingham, Alabama, is a guide lover’s dream.
To the left is a show of latest releases—up to date each Tuesday—and colourful guide covers fill the partitions. The all-important suggestion playing cards peek out from cabinets and vary from new additions to a couple which have survived 4 years within the store, highlighting the titles that booksellers and co-owners can’t get out of their heads.
“It’s a really Instagrammable retailer, we’ve been advised, however I do assume that individuals are available right here to only take a break from their screens and take a break from the tempo of their common lives,” says co-owner Kristen Iskandrian MA ’03, PhD ’09.
There are many nooks the place quiet consumers browse and disappear, and there’s additionally all the time a pleasant face—or three—prepared to offer a suggestion.
“It was essential for us that whenever you stroll in, you already know it’s a bookstore and never a present store,” says co-owner Laura Cotten AB ’12. “We love reward outlets and quirky presents, however we wish to be actually book-heavy.”
For the house, it’s an enormous variety of books that ranges from previous favorites and bestsellers to poetry and small press. And all of them—6,000 titles once they first opened—had been hand chosen by Cotten, Iskandrian, and their third co-owner Elizabeth Goodrich.
“We actually picked them out title by title,” Iskandrian says. “We combed our personal bookshelves. We had many conversations about what’s essential to us. We requested our neighborhood, ‘What’s essential to y’all?’ It was such an unscientific solution to do it.”
Impartial bookstores are a mirrored image of the individuals who work there. You are able to do what you need, and that’s empowering and thrilling—and in addition actually overwhelming at occasions.” — Kristen Iskandrian, co-owner of Thank You Books, an impartial bookstore positioned in Birmingham, Alabama
It was additionally chaotic. Since its early days, the store has curated its course of, homing in on native tastes, refining picks, and making its mark in the neighborhood.
“Impartial bookstores are a mirrored image of the individuals who work there,” Iskandrian says. “You are able to do what you need, and that’s empowering and thrilling—and in addition actually overwhelming at occasions.”
Identical to its cabinets, the store’s calendar can also be packed. Whether or not it’s a guide membership, writer occasion, or story time, the shop attracts a crowd. Generally it’s a summer season studying kickoff, full with face portray and guests milling between Thank You Books and a neighboring soda store for an ice cream social. Different occasions, it’s a crowd sitting in folding chairs asking keen questions of a visiting writer.
“We’ve known as ourselves the neighborhood bookstore for a very long time, however actually having been right here for four-and-a-half years now, we’re studying that we’re part of the neighborhood greater than we ever have been earlier than,” Cotten says.
All of it facilities on a love of books. And that’s what introduced Cotten, Iskandrian, and Goodrich collectively all these years in the past. Though Cotten and Iskandrian’s time in Athens overlapped briefly, their friendship grew—and blossomed right into a enterprise—after that they had moved away.
Iskandrian was residing in Birmingham, and Cotten was in Ann Arbor, Michigan. A social media put up musing over a dreamy native bookstore helped draw Cotten again to the Iron Metropolis, the place she had earned a grasp’s in secondary English.
Thank You Books opened in late 2019, just some months earlier than the COVID-19 pandemic meant guide purchases moved on-line and the store’s rigorously curated cabinets had been seen solely by the home windows.
“It was very a lot a ‘soar and construct your wings on the way in which down’ course of,” Cotten says.
It’s virtually unimaginable to separate Thank You Books’ beginnings from the pandemic, Cotten and Iskandrian say, however these challenges additionally shaped sturdy neighborhood bonds. To at the present time, readers will come into the shop to say, “I began studying once more across the time y’all opened.”
“We didn’t essentially know that might occur, however now it has, and it’s probably the most rewarding factor that we hear,” Cotten says.
They’ve additionally seen the neighborhood develop, each by relationships with different native companies and actually as their youngest patrons develop from infants to toddlers and from toddlers to younger readers. However on the coronary heart of the shop a love of books stays.
Their greatest hope is that when a customer reads “You Are Welcome” on the wall behind the register, they know indubitably that it’s true.
When Laura Cotten and Kristen Iskandrian opened Thank You Books in 2019, they hand-selected each guide that appeared on their cabinets. All 6,000 of them. They’ve a extra curated course of now, but it surely stays domestically targeted. (Photograph by Peter Frey/UGA)
