Four Questions with Bookish Notions

I dropped in to meet Allison and drop off some RAMP holiday catalogs. Media is a small city in a county first established by William Penn in 1681. The area has both new suburbs with their strip-mall sprawl and also almost ridiculously quaint historic cities with thriving high streets. Media is definitely historic and quaint.

Tell me a little about the store

I have always known that I wanted to open an independent bookstore. I expected it would be after I’d had a longer career in teaching and counseling, but in 2023 or so I decided I wanted to make actual concrete plans to make the dream a reality. So I started doing lots of research trying to find a good location. I found this one, and we opened at the end of 2024.

 I ended up looking in Media by doing searches for towns without bookstores. I first put pins on a map of all of the existing bookstores in the greater Philadelphia area, because I knew I wanted to be in a suburb of Philly. We weren’t tied to a specific city, but were looking for holes where there was not a bookstore but it seemed like there should be one. I centered in on a few towns—Media, Westchester, and Kennett Square. [Note – all three now have bookstores!] There were  some very stark differences between the costs/possibilities in the cities and I really fell in love with Media. The people I met here, and the other types of stores that were already here, were so welcoming, so I arranged a meeting with their business authority executive director. We got a cup of coffee and he shared with me that they had been actively interested in having a bookstore here for some time. He and I kept in touch over many months and eventually when a storefront opened up I actually learned about it from him. I was able to immediately come in for an interview, and he vouched for me even though I had never had a business before. I signed for the building very quickly, and since then it’s been wonderful working with the Media business authority. They do so many wonderful events and festivals – Media loves a parade for any reason—so there's always foot traffic and it's a great place.

What’s working well for you right now?

 The partnership with the community and the growing group of book nerds that consider this their home base! They make everything else about running a business so joyful. When we first opened some of the sections weren’t really anything to write home about. For example I don’t read a lot of horror, so initially I tried my best but it was sparse. Now I feel really proud of our horror section because we have so many horror readers, and a horror book club that's thriving, and now those readers shape what we stock. The same is true for many other genres. So I think that's the most rewarding piece of this. People have this craving for something that's analog, something that's not scrolling, something that's not despairing about the state of the world. And they want a place where they can meet other bookish people and discover new things to read, a place that is a really supportive and friendly community.

It makes me think that we don’t talk often enough about how, at a really great Indie, the owner and the buyer and the staff curate the collection but the readers also curate the collection. It really is a shared project by the time the store is thriving and I don't think we frame it that way strongly enough. This wasn’t something I anticipated. My staff and I are all naturally curious people and also we're always looking for a good recommendations from our customers which we are happy to share. There are countless books now that I can recommend confidently to other customers, books that I haven't read yet but I can say, “A a lot of our customers really like this in this and this.” We have a physical space in the store to mirror that philosophy. There are four shelves in the front of the store which you might think are staff picks but actually they're curated by community members. We ask key members each month to curate a shelf for a month and that is so much fun because our regulars like to come in and will say, “I don’t know who this Samantha is, but I know she’s my girl now, I really love her book choices.”

 Similarly we have these bookmarks to fill out that are community recommendations. People write why they love a certain book and then we stick it in the book. When the book sells we keep it to put in the next copy. It’s a nice way to scan the shelves in an unfamiliar genre and find books that your neighbors have recommended.

What parts of how the wider book industry interacts with Indie bookstores would you like to see changed or improved?

What comes immediately to mind is that I still don't feel like I'm doing my ordering of inventory in the best way.  I so what I do so far is I order all my books through Ingram and while that is convenient and allows me to get the books within a short amount of turnaround time for my customers I know I'm leaving money on the table versus ordering through each individual representative. I wish I had a clearer picture of how to do that better. [Note – NAIBA will do publisher introductions for our stores so we’re ready to help Allison get started.]

What keeps you up at night?

Thinking about the business side of things. It’s not my favorite thing trying to run reports to provide to the accountant, and it makes me feel insecure about my abilities even though I feel really on top of all the book related and people related stuff. I have great employees, and I feel really good about the business except feeling in control of the financials. I know my bills are paid and my  bank balance is going up over time and that's a positive thing, but personally privately sometimes I feel like a phony because I never went to business school and I don't have that expertise. So that's what keeps me up at night. [Note: I let Allison know that hers is a statement that is true for probably 90% of bookstore owners, and not true for the other 10% only because they fled to bookselling from finance.]  

Most people don’t understand going into business NOT for money. A local high school sent their kids out to walk along State Street and speak to different business owners. They were asking various things about whether this was my first business, how did I write a business plan, and it was very interesting because I had to explain to them that for me the journey was very different. I’m not here because I wanted to be a business person, but because of a love of  books and reading and then I had to decide how I could best share that. I tried being an English teacher and found that that wasn't quite the way I wanted to interact with the world through books. This is a different way of getting to my goal, but it wasn't because I wanted to be a business owner.

What events or programs have been working well for you?

Our biggest programming is the six book clubs that meet here monthly: fiction, fantasy and sci-fi, horror, classics, history, and LGBT+. The classics club started as the Jane Austen book club but after a year we ran out of Jane Austen, even including her juvenilia, so we expanded to read other classics written by women. The book clubs work really well for us. We don't require people to sign up in advance, they don't even have to buy the book here, and it's free to attend. But the readers who come are drawn in by community and become customers. We also have a writers circle that meets here monthly, and occasional author events with regional authors. We’re not trying to land the big name authors at this time as what works well for us is being approached by an author whose book really resonates with me, a book I think my community will enjoy. Then we schedule an event where I’m in dialogue with them followed by a Q&A and book reading and signing. That’s been a nice way to expose my readers to some local writers. But that’s not nearly as much of our programming as the book clubs.

The last thing is that every quarter we have a Queer Open Mic night here. That’s been super fun and one of my favorite events. Occasionally we have private parties, like we've had some people do bridal showers here, and we even hosted a wedding once, which was crazy but beautiful.

Bookish Notions is located at 11 East State Street Media, PA 19063-2935.

If you’d like to see more store photos and information, see the write-up of Kit’s visit in the 11/13/2025 NAIBA newsletter.

Media was incorporated in 1850, in an area chartered by William Penn in 1681, hence the level of historic quaintness. When you visit you can cruise the shops on State Street, and leave time to visit Tyler Arboretum, Linvilla Orchards (if you come in the fall you must able to handle large crowds there as it is a cross between  self-pick farm and theme park fueled by famous apple cider donuts), and leave time for a meal at Wolff’s Apple House, a combination farmer’s market, garden center, and restaurant, open since 1910.