Where Books Abound
An Eastern undergraduate brings bookselling back to Cheney.
Once upon a time, not so very long ago, the Nashville-based author turned bookseller Ann Patchett was asked why she was so passionate about bookstores. “I think a big component of loving books is the desire to share them and to talk about them and to recommend them to other people,” she said. “We have to take responsibility for the places where this happens, not wait for them to go away and then miss them terribly.”
For many years, Cheney has been missing such a place, and terribly.
No longer. Hidden away behind 1st Street’s Mason Jar restaurant, Paperbound Books is a tiny, impossibly cute gathering place for readers. It’s proprietor, Kate MacDonald, 25, is an Eastern undergraduate studying music technology. She runs the store pretty much on her own — a solitary labor of love that allows her to serve as content curator to a diverse clientele. “Books make people happy. You just have to match them with the right one,” she says.
Even as a little girl growing up in Idaho, MacDonald loved books. “I had a 300-book, thrift-store collection by the time I was 12, and they were all alphabetized in a notebook,” she says. The idea for Paperbound came after she moved from Spokane to Cheney and found herself lamenting the lack of a bookshop.
“I’d always wanted to start something on my own,” she says. “I was like, ’Why can’t I do something like that here?’”
So MacDonald set to work. She typed, “How do you write a business plan?” into Google, then honed a strategy with several local experts. Next she created a website and started amassing inventory, collecting tomes from wherever people were divesting themselves of used volumes. She started selling at pop-ups and the Cheney farmer’s market, all the while keeping her eyes open for potential brick-and-mortar storefronts.
Her ambitions got a big boost from Douglas LaBar, the Mason Jar’s owner, who told her his building had a great little space available. He then proceeded, with the help of his father-in-law, the building’s owner, to personally complete Paperbound’s charmingly bohemian build-out. “We just want a bookstore in here,” LaBar told MacDonald. “And this is going to be yours.”
In spite of the challenges facing all booksellers these days, Paperbound has been a success. After recently celebrating the shop’s one-year anniversary, MacDonald is optimistic that her many customers represent a resurgence of interest in the printed word. “People stopped reading printed books for a really long time because of e-books, digital and social media, all of that,” MacDonald says. “But I’m confident that the pendulum is swinging back from digital media to physical objects. Especially with Gen Z, books are definitely back in style.”
As are, she might have added, cozy places to connect with them.
