Laurie’s Books is a local bookstore that supports the wellbeing of its community through buying and selling print media, providing excellent customer service, hosting local events, and being a good neighbor and destination for the community.
Laurie’s Books began as Laurie’s Paperback Exchange in 1982. The most recent new owners, Rekha and Louis Burns took over the store in August 2022. Rekha comes to the store with 15 years of prior bookstore management experience.
To that point, the business model had been to trade or exchange mass marketing paperbacks for half their resale value, which was half their listed price. That often works out to $1-2. Then, they grant that much as store credit, of which half could be used in future transactions. As you can imagine, it’s hard to keep the lights on and pay employees like that.
That business model doesn’t work for bringing in more valuable merchandise than the existing used mass-marketing paperback books with so much outstanding store credit. Therefore, to keep the store open and running and become profitable, Rekha and Louis decided to phase out the existing store credit system to make way for improved inventory.
After the first year, the rent increase forced them to relocate down the street to the Southridge Shopping Center. It was a bigger space, and no contractors were willing to build shelves, so Louis and a few volunteers built them all.
To improve the store as a community destination, they welcome local authors and artists to showcase their work at weekend events.
If you are local and would like to volunteer to help us shelve books or build out the new location, stop by or email us at storemanager@lauriesbooks.store.
Our old location:
