Featured Post: Candy Justice

Candy Justice is a professor at the University of Memphis who was been a core supporter of the Save Booksellers movement from the very beginning. She is a loyal Booksellers' fan and all-around fantastic person, and her featured message represents just these aspects. Please share Candy's lovely message and continue spreading the love campaign message all day. Thank you Candy:

What Booksellers Means to Me

From Candy Justice

"I have been a customer of Booksellers at Laurelwood for its whole 30 plus years in all three locations. It was originally Davis Kidd Booksellers and some of us still call it “The Kidd.” I happily shopped there in the first two nearby locations, but when it moved to its present location it became heaven on earth with its wonderful layout, cozy reading spots, fabulous smell of new books, wonderful meals in the bistro, friendly and helpful booksellers, and most of all thousands of books. It has been my home away from home ever since, or in the current parlance “my third place.”

It is where I took my young children to feed their love of reading and where they take their children for the same reason. It is the place where I discovered new authors and excitedly bought the latest book by long-term favorite writers. At the bistro, I had three-hour lunches with my former student and now published author Johanna Edwards, talking about what we were reading, what we were writing and just celebrating the written word. At the next table there might be the French Club speaking French while they ate or a book club meeting. My husband and I ate at the bistro many times after teaching our classes when we were just friends, and our romance blossomed there.

On Fridays when I didn’t have classes, I would take my papers to grade at the bookstore. Then I would treat myself to wandering the bookshelves picking up four or five finalists for which book I would buy that day. I would settle into one of the comfy chairs in the middle of the store, prop my feet on the rim of the fireplace that later became a fountain, and read the first few pages of each finalist, and in the end bought all of them. The only problem was figuring out which book to read first.

My birthday last week was the first special occasion in all these years that I didn’t get Booksellers gift cards as gifts from family and friends — they knew what I always wanted.

I can’t imagine my life without this bookstore, and I fear losing this wonderful place, but I refuse to give up hope that it will rise from the ashes."