There was something about the bookstore down the block from Andrea Sifuentes’ apartment. It felt, she says, like walking into an episode of Gilmore Girls – a quintessentially quaint experience.
Maybe it’s because she was in New England at the time, living in Providence as her husband attended the Rhode Island School of Design. But the shelves at Books on the Square charmed her in a way she soon realized she’d been waiting for her hometown of Houston to charm her for years.
She’d always been bookish, more comfortable engrossed in black ink on crisp white pages than the prospect of an outdoor adventure. But Houston didn’t always make that easy.
“The whole time I was growing up, the only place to go for books was the library, or like Barnes & Noble on West Gray – or places further out that take a while to get to, and my parents couldn’t always take us to, and definitely couldn’t always afford,” she said.
She hoped by the time she returned to Houston that the great blossoming currently sweeping the East End, springing up coffee shops and small, cozy businesses, would have fixed this. Alas.
“We get back, and the area has definitely changed, but there’s still no access for books, or a lot of those little things that I’d been looking for as a kid that read too much and didn’t always love the park,” she said. “It still just wasn’t there.”
So she built it.
Last May, Sifuentes and her husband invested $600 into a storage bin worth of books and set up a little pop-up shop at the Ironworks building in the East End during one of Ironworks’ weekly shop local market events.
She sold about half of her inventory. But perhaps more importantly, she fielded a lot of interest. People asked for specific titles, talked to Sifuentes about her chosen genre – romance – and inspired her to size up to larger markets.
Demand was so intense that by last fall, her initial investment ballooned into a self-sustaining business with inventory spilling out of six storage bins. It was time, she and her husband agreed, to open her own bookstore. One with charm.
So began the brick-and-mortar operations of Mossrose Bookshop, a romance-focused store tucked into the back hallway at Ironworks. When it opened in early March, Mossrose became Houston’s newest bookstore – a superlative that, if current rates continue, could be stripped from the store at any moment.
In the past six months alone, Anna and Chris Henry have opened their new bookstore, Good On Paper Books & Stationery on West 19th Street in the Heights, while Elizabeth Farfán-Santos has launched her own East End-based popup, Dreamers Books + Culture, and Sifuentes opened the doors at Mossrose to 1,035 shoppers on its inaugural weekend.
It’s all a part of what those in the know are calling a “reading renaissance” here in Houston. And while the explosion of independent bookshops feels a bit breakneck, shopowners say there is room for everyone.
“There’s more than enough space for all the indies that currently exist, and even the ones that want to come up,” says Dara Landry, who opened Third Ward’s CLASS Bookstore with her husband David Landry in 2020. “We’re better when there are more bookstores.”
And there certainly are more. Last year, Landry led the charge of launching Houston’s first independent bookstore crawl, which challenged locals to visit 18 participating small bookstores throughout the month of April. This year, the number of participating shops has jumped to 25, thanks to the field’s growth. Landry was stunned by the participation rates last year, she says. After originally printing off 150 bingo boards to hand out to shoppers to be stamped at each of the area’s participating shops, she learned she would need to continue making photocopies. In the end, 1,800 shoppers submitted completed sheets.
“We have that kind of demand,” says Landry, who upped her copying budget for this year’s crawl, which kicks off on Tuesday.
And Houston, it seems, is part of a bigger bookshop bounceback story. In the past five years, the number of independent bookstores across Texas has increased by 70 percent as 76 new shops have opened, says Allison Hill, chief executive officer of the American Booksellers Association.
It’s a surprising turnaround for those who watched the industry collapse in recent decades, as megaretailers like Amazon undercut smaller shops. Indeed, when Anna and Chris Henry applied for their first small business loan for Good On Paper last year, they were quickly denied.
“They told us, ‘That’s like a romantic idea, it’s not a real idea,’” Anna Henry recalls, laughing.
But the demand at Good On Paper is very, very real.
“I’ve actually had people say when they shop here that they’re thankful we’re here, because they do want to support small business,” says Michelle Moore, a retired children’s librarian who now works at the shop. “More and more we’re getting that. They don’t want to give their money to Amazon. They don’t want to give it to Barnes & Noble.”
That desire to “shop local” exists far beyond the Heights, which, as one of the city’s most affluent neighborhoods, is home to families with more disposable income than other parts of the city.
“Coming out of the pandemic, people really realized what is important,” says Hill, of the American Booksellers Association. “We want to support the local bookstore, because we want to make sure these places continue to exist. There’s a significant rallying around shopping local that is energized in a new way.”
She notes that about 30 percent of revenue collected by independent bookstores recirculates back into the local economy. “That’s twice what happens when you shop at Barnes & Noble, and four times what happens when you shop at Amazon,” she says.
That connection to community matters. At Mossrose, Sifuentes prides herself on her shop’s ability to fill a gap in the city’s East End, which has long been a “book desert.”
The neighborhood’s Houston Public Library Branch, Flores Neighborhood Library, was closed for several years following damage from Hurricane Harvey. Even since its full reopening halfway through 2021, its use has lagged behind the rest of the system’s branches: In 2023, when HPL branches recorded an average of 51,423 visits, Flores was near the bottom of the stack at 14,406. Its circulation figures were similarly low with users checking out 21,000 items, compared to a system average of 92,000.
On opening weekend, Sifuentes was overwhelmed by the force with which new customers celebrated both her presence and the selection of books delicately organized on her royal blue shelves. Many feature protagonists of color on their covers, with dozens set along a special bookcase reserved for Spanish language books.
“I know how much I’ve struggled looking for representation in books,” Sifuentes says. “And I don’t want to leave anyone out.”
That sentiment is echoed in new shops across the city, from Black-owned shops like CLASS to Latina-owned operations like Dreamers.
“When I’m doing this, I’m thinking about my mom, I’m thinking about my dad. I’m thinking about the people in my family that would never walk into a bookstore unless I dragged them in on my birthday,” says Farfán-Santos, of Dreamers. “What would make them feel welcome? What would make them want to go into this space? Because that’s the kind of access that we need more of. If we really want to democratize literary access, we have to expand who has access.”
The pop-up model has helped entrepreneurs like Farfán-Santos enter the bookstore space so she can continue to expand access for readers. She hopes that one day she will be able to take the leap from storage bins to a brick-and-mortar like Mossrose and CLASS.
“We have no shame in telling people that CLASS was started on an $800 credit limit and a dream,” Landry says. “In a traditional bookstore model, where we’d go brick-and-mortar first, we wouldn’t have been able to.”
Landry’s original plans for her store included goals to open a physical location roughly five years after CLASS began selling online and via pop-ups in November, 2020. By that original timeline, she’d be looking for a physical space right now. Yet CLASS was able to open its Third Ward location in December, 2022 – three years ahead of schedule, thanks to the demand in Houston’s market.
“We are, we’re really on a literary renaissance here in the city of Houston,” she says. “And I’m super excited to be part of that resurgence.”
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