Opening a Bookstore: An Act of Community
On the morning we opened the doors of Johnson’s Literary Depot for the first time, the street outside was still gathering itself. A few runners passed by. A delivery truck idled at the corner. The air felt unhurried, like the day was stretching awake. I remember standing inside the shop before anyone arrived, listening to the quiet of the room. The few shelves we had held their own kind of stillness, the kind that settles in a place before it learns the rhythms of people coming and going. For a moment, it struck me that a bookstore doesn’t become a bookstore until someone takes a book from a shelf, flips it open, and feels at home.
Owning a small business downtown often gets framed as an act of entrepreneurship, and it is. There are spreadsheets and long nights and decisions that don’t announce themselves gently. But as I stood there that morning, I realized that opening a bookstore has never felt like a purely economic choice. It felt closer to planting something. A bookstore isn’t built for efficiency. It’s built for connection, curiosity, and a kind of shared attention that is getting harder to find.
When people walk through the door, they’re not just buying a book. They’re stepping into a small, intentional space where time slows down just enough to consider what matters. And in a downtown that is still carving out its identity, that kind of space takes on its own meaning. It becomes part of the texture of the street, part of the long conversation a city has with itself about who it wants to be.
In the weeks after opening, I started to notice patterns. A college student who came in every Thursday after class and moved straight to the poetry section. A pair of friends who sat near the front window with novels they had no intention of buying, content just to be in the warmth of the place. A retired teacher who talked about the decades she spent trying to convince young readers that books could change the direction of a life. These weren’t transactions. They were small affirmations that a bookstore lives through the people who gather inside it.
Running a shop downtown also means listening closely to the block around you. The rhythms of the morning crowd. The quiet stretch in the early afternoon. The way a single event on the calendar can shift the flow of foot traffic for an entire evening. In that listening, I’ve learned that a bookstore doesn’t stand apart from its surroundings. It is shaped by them. If the sidewalks are alive, the shop feels alive. If the community is wrestling with change, the weight of that change settles into the space too.
There are days when the work feels simple and days when it feels heavier. On slow afternoons, I’ll rearrange a table, sweep the floor again, or take a quiet moment just to breathe in the scent of the pages. On busy mornings, I’ll watch people spill through the doorway in a kind of gentle chaos, each person carrying their own needs and questions. What anchors me most is the understanding that a bookstore is not mine alone. I might hold the keys, but the place belongs to the people who let it matter to them.
Opening the Depot also changed the way I see my other work on Main Street. It made the abstract goals of revitalization tangible. When we talk about activating vacant spaces or improving our district, we’re talking about the conditions that make places like this possible. A bookstore only thrives when the street around it is healthy. When we invest in sidewalks, lighting, green spaces, or building improvements, we’re investing in the daily experience of someone who might wander in looking for a story to take home.
And in a way, that’s what this whole project has become for me, a way of stitching stories together. Stories of readers finding themselves again. Stories of downtown residents discovering a place to linger. Stories of entrepreneurs dreaming of their own space on this street. Each story adds texture to the larger one we’re writing as a community, the one that says downtown Johnson City is a place worth caring about.
As the months pass, I’ve noticed that the bookstore teaches me something quiet about commitment. Not the loud kind that announces itself, but the steady, grounded kind that grows from showing up, unlocking the door, and being present for whoever walks through it. Community doesn’t arrive fully formed. It gathers in small, consistent moments. In borrowed chairs. In shared recommendations. In the decision to linger a little longer than necessary.
Some evenings, after closing, I sit for a moment before turning out the lights. The street outside softens as the day winds down. The shelves stand in stillness again. And I think about how unlikely and beautiful it is that a room full of books can become a meeting place for a downtown, a small anchor in a city that continues to rise and reshape itself.
Opening a bookstore isn’t just a business venture. It’s a quiet act of community. A way of saying, without fanfare, that stories matter, that gathering matters, and that a downtown can grow stronger when it has places where people feel seen, even in the smallest of ways.