Co-opening a bookstore is the new driving off a cliff with your bestie.
One day, the friends have had enough with their husbands, their jobs, their lives, and decide to make a break for it. They grip hands, stuff their weapons* into the glove box, and… open a bookstore together. It’s a thing.
“Over a drink in the pub one evening, we started to sketch out what our ideal lifestyle might look like,” friends Amber Harrison and Karen Brazier told The Guardian of their decision to open Folde, a nature-themed bookshop in the UK.
“We were sitting in Sarah’s garden, drinking wine, missing community spaces and rethinking what we wanted to do with our lives if things ever got back to a semblance of normality,” Rosie May said of opening an intersectional feminist and queer bookshop with her friend Sarah Scales.
Guardian reporter Nadia Khomami sourced enough of these pairs to assure readers that best-friend bookstores are a real trend, and that you, too, could be just one wine or beer or triple-martini away from doing the same with your bestie.
Isn’t that the dream? Who among us has not wished that they could be invited in by Ann Patchett to take magic mushrooms among the stacks of Nell Zink and Samantha Hunt novels? Who has not browsed especially slowly through Books Are Magic hoping Emma Straub might compliment them on their choice of Groff tome?
Harvey Keitel can’t stop you now! Only a lack of capital and the yoke of responsibility can! So go forth and
*Ferrante, probably.
[via The Guardian]
