When Whose Books Neighborhood Bookstore owners Claudia and John Vega were growing up in Oak Cliff, they both recall going north of the Trinity River to buy their books.
“We didn’t have access to a bookstore like this in our neighborhood,” Claudia Vega says while sitting in the lounge of the West Davis Street shop. “We were fortunate enough that our families really had the agency and took us to North Dallas or to the suburbs.”
John Tilton, who has spent over half a century with Lucky Dog Books (originally founded as Mesquite’s Saturday Paperbacks in 1973), recalls a time when there was nowhere for our neighbors to take used books. The Oak Cliff location, which was first housed at 621 W. Davis St., has been on Jefferson for a decade.
“I kind of wonder here, the psychology of the neighborhood, if there was so long a time where there were only a few (bookstores) … people just felt like, ‘Gosh, I don’t see any place to buy books. I don’t want to get rid of the ones I have,’” he says.
In 2015, Deep Vellum Books owner Will Evans wrote in Literary Hub that “everything in the Dallas-Fort Worth literary scene today begins and ends at The Wild Detectives.” Since then, there have been up to four indie bookstores at a time just within Bishop Arts.
The newest arrival to our neighborhood is Blush Bookstore, Dallas’s first romance bookshop, and though Pan-African Connection Bookstore & Resource Center had a brief stint in South Dallas from 2010-2015, it remains the longest-running bookstore with Oak Cliff origins.
It’s clear Oak Cliff has become a hub for independent bookstores. But why is that? And can it last?
Photography by Lauren Allen
BOOKSTORES’ BEGINNINGS
When Akwete Tyehimba’s late husband, Bandele, wanted to open a bookshop, he had a specific vision.
“He was someone who was always involved in different organizations dealing with Black culture and Pan-Africanism, so he really wanted to have a space people could come to and get information about Africa and kind of connect our identities and our history and our culture so people can have a stronger and more confident identity of who they are,” Tyehimba says.
At that time, there was another Black bookstore in Oak Cliff, Black Images Book Bazaar, which was the oldest one of its kind in Texas before closing in 2006.
“They were definitely the trailblazers, and then we came along to sort of give people just a little bit more history on Africa,” she says. “So that’s the main thing. But it was really his vision to have a space people could come to, organize, strategize and just kind of feel safe within themselves.”
Pan-African Connection opened in 1989 on Jefferson and is now located in the Glendale Shopping Center.
“We’ve changed locations about maybe four, five times really, but the majority, for 21 years of that, we were in Oak Cliff until we moved to South Dallas in 2010 for five years,” Tyehimba says. “Oak Cliff, at that time, the demographics were predominantly Black, so of course demographics have changed now to be almost half Latino, half Black, but it was a good space, very central location that no matter where Black people lived they would come to Oak Cliff. Oak Cliff was a very established area where the majority of Black people lived, and that we could tap in, too.”
Then, it was Lucky Dog Books in 2012. Tilton says he picked this area because “there was nobody here.”
There was not a bookstore in this part of town, and I mean, we could have gone to some place like Carrollton or something,” he says. He adds that living in southeast Dallas, the space at Davis was “wonderful.”
Javier García del Moral took inspiration from the Texas Theatre to start The Wild Detectives in 2014 with co-owner Paco Vique. They each moved to Dallas in the early 2000s.
Photography by Lauren Allen
“My friend Paco and I used to go there just to hang out, and by having conversations with the people there, with the owners, that’s how they proposed we do a movie series, and all those things led to having the bookstore.”
He notes the multi-purpose areas of our neighborhood, and Bishop Arts in particular, gave a similar feel to what you can find in Europe, with people living in the same area as where they work or hang out.
“They usually behave differently with their environment, and those are things that are sometimes hard to pin down, but you can feel them,” García del Moral says, “and that sort of feeling is what we capture in Oak Cliff, and that’s why we decided to open up the bookstore in that area.”
There’s also been recent growth in our indie scene. Whose Books opened in 2021 originally at Tyler Station with the launch of their nonprofit arm, Activating Reading Communities Organization (ARCO), a year later to help remove barriers to book access. Then the second (and now only) Blush opened in 2024.
The Wild Detectives is now two bars and two venues, with the “Stories” location at the original Eighth Street address hosting fiction, poetry and literature in Spanish and the “Ideas” location, formerly Sketches of Spain, which opened in September to focus on history, philosophy, science, memoir, culture and the arts.
THE BOOK BOOMS
Booktok. Bookstagram. Book influencers are often taking over social media feeds.
That is part of what inspired Jaclyn Wooten, owner of Blush, to get back into reading, ultimately leading to her career change. When she discovered the earlier days of the bookish social media space, she “started devouring” books with her new author discoveries and increased interest in the romance genre.
“I have always loved reading, but I’ll say that like a lot of people, there’s kind of that story about rediscovering your love of reading and not just reading, but reading fiction and a lot of it during the pandemic, during 2020,” she says. “It’s the era of hobbies at home and just having so much more time than I had previously, and I think a lot of people will always feel like they don’t have time to read. And this was really a time where that excuse just didn’t exist.”
Photography by Lauren Allen
With her background in design and newfound passion, she was able to take a side gig making book-themed merchandise on Etsy and create the brand House of Jupiter, eventually launching her own indie bookstore.
“I didn’t have the bookstore dream first. I think a lot of people who own bookstores will tell you, ‘I grew up thinking about this. I’ve always loved reading, and I’ve always wanted to.’ It was kind of the secondary thing because being an online business can be really lonely and isolating, and I just really wanted to feel some of that community that existed online in person,” Wooten says.
Tyehimba described a similar boom that happened in the ’90s, specifically for Black bookstores focused on culture.
“I mean, in Dallas, there were probably about five Black bookstores in existence, so it was a good time for Black bookstores,” she says. “There was just a resurgence of wanting to know your history and culture.”
But with that rise of bookstores came a fall that was felt throughout the independent bookstore community.
“There just used to be a zillion of them until the internet came along. Not Amazon, but the internet itself was what really began to kick things for us,” Tilton says. “And cable TV then, of course, the little spate with e-books when that was really big for a little while until it hit a happy medium of being something useful, but not the entirety of the business.”
INDIE STRUGGLES
Ironically to the talk of the book trends today, there was a time when many thought their shop may disappear. And for good reason, from evictions (which Pan-African suffered from in 2015) to a lack of lease renewals (which caused the move of Lucky Dog Books and the closure of Poet Books’s Bishop Arts location). There’s also the rise of the internet and the marked-down prices from massive global companies.
“Amazon, right? You can’t beat Amazon,” Tyehimba says.
It’s hard to stay afloat.
Independent bookstores that work with new books have a different model than a global company when it comes to pricing their books. They get their number directly from the publisher.
“We noticed lately that a lot of bookstores around the country are starting to do posts that explain how narrow the profit margin is, how hard it is for them to keep up with the increasing lease,” Claudia Vega says. “How many of them are facing closure because even though they have consistent traffic, it doesn’t make enough to cover the increased expenses that our economy is facing, and we’re seeing more and more of those posted.”
“And book prices are going up, so the customer has to pay more if they go to an independent bookstore,” John Vega adds.
Such significant price differences affect “the sustainability of running a bookstore,” as Claudia Vega puts it.
Tilton says that his rent has increased drastically, with the current rent “now 150% more.”
“The store is generally on a much better footing. … We were frankly paying probably less than we should have paid before,” he says. “But, the amount, they’re really running an experiment to see just how much will the market bear, and the only way you find that out is by having people go out of business because they can’t pay it, which will be a bad way to go if it does.”
Even beyond the brick-and-mortars and unknowns of the future, Tilton notes that the literary scene is here.
NOTHING GOLD CAN STAY (OR CAN IT?)
“Well, one thing to credit over here, too, is that there have been a couple different community organizations that have really, I think, boosted the literary scene, so to speak,” he says. “And I’ll use that term broadly. You know, their focus might have been on more ‘literary stuff,’ but it just boosts the overall reading community, period.”
Tilton specifically highlights The Writer’s Garret and the events hosted at Apprentice Creative Space.
Bookstore owners also have a goal to have more than just a shopping experience for customers.
“They create third spaces. They’re much more than just a retail store, right?” Claudia Vega says. “It is a community hub, but that takes a lot of partnerships and trust-building and really the desire to see something like this succeed in your neighborhood.”
Claudia Vega says she hopes it’s not just a trend with this rise of book interest back again.
Like Wooten mentioned, there’s a desire for community. García del Moral says that he believes there will always be spaces like that, whether or not it is a bookstore.
“It’s always hard to predict the future, especially nowadays with things changing so rapidly,” he says. “I’m almost 50 years old. My generation, obviously, we already seek those places, and I think there was a gap with the younger generation that was very absorbed by the social media tools, and at some point, it was very hard for them to actually get out and find spaces to interact with each other physically. But I think that the next generations are actually trying to reclaim that because they realize that there is a particular factor of the physical interaction that it can’t be replicated in the digital world and that it brings peace to your mind.”
