Bub’s Bookstore is Carson City’s newest independent bookshop, the brainchild of owners Rob Fuller and Demi Pettway who are hoping to build a space that isn’t the go-to place to grab a novel, but to make connections and build community.
Pettway moved to Carson City in 2019 to be closer to her family as the pandemic began, and found that the transition from college life to the “real world” came with a new realization: the built-in sense of community and encouragement from friends was suddenly gone.
“When we were in college, we flourished within the sense of community that we had when we were always around our friends,” she said. “We were always seeing them and building towards something together and encouraging each other. Getting out of that into the real world where it’s missing — it’s really a bit jarring. So we would like to create a place for community, for education, for people to connect with each other.”
Fuller said that while they’ve been bouncing around ideas for a while, the concept of a community bookshop crystallized when he read a recent RGJ poll asking where readers like to hang out, “And I think all but one of the responses were restaurants.”
“The trendy term is ‘third spaces,’” he continued. “There’s no real third spaces in Carson; people want to have a place where they don’t feel pressured to buy something or get a drink or go somewhere just to eat or whatever — they can just kind of hang out and exist. So we ran with it.”
While the bookshop will, naturally, be carrying books for sale, Fuller and Pettway also plan to host activities, built partnerships with other businesses and groups, and open their doors as a true grass-roots community hub.
Some of the ideas they’re currently working on will be themed bookclubs — while they hope members of the community will also use their space to host their bookclubs, they want to create their own as well to reach specific demographics.
“Two of the book club ideas I have are ‘Books with the Boys,’ because I feel like men and boys don’t read as much as women and girls do,” Fuller said. “So if we can provide a space for them to read, I think it will be really cool. We’ll start with something like Pierce Brown’s Red Rising, something very in your face, war, to get them engaged.”
He said their second concept would be a book-and-movie pairing, in which they group would read a book together that’s been turned into a movie, and then the shop will host a movie night screening the movie and they can discuss the adaptation afterwards.
While looking for a space to rent, Fuller said they’d checked out a few different locations, but happened to be walking past the building of Aunt B’s 2 Antiques and Gifts when he said he saw a lease sign had just gone up outside. He contacted the property owner and just a few days later they were signing the paperwork.
“The downtown is such a cool area, and it has the potential to be a hub of Carson City culture, whatever that looks like. I think it just needs to evolve and provide the spaces people want to be in. I think if people see [the bookstore] and they enjoy it, they’ll be like, ‘Oh, maybe we could do something similar.’ And then the whole downtown main street can be really cool.”
Fuller said that through this process, the best part has been meeting people who are like-minded and are already doing many of the things they want to do so they can form partnerships and connections with the other businesses and groups in the city. They are hoping to coordinate with the Brewery Arts Center and their upcoming June pride event, and potentially host pop-up book fairs at different spaces around town.
They’re awaiting the keys from the owners right now, and hope to be open by early June.
When the doors finally open, visitors can expect an eclectic inventory including outdoor recreation, Northern Nevada history, sci-fi, romance, fiction, books by local authors, children’s books and more. The building even features an indoor kitchen, which will naturally house the store’s cookbook section.
In the meantime, the community can support the shop’s start-up costs through an active GoFundMe campaign or by purchasing books through their Bookshop.org affiliate link, which grants the store a 30 percent commission on online sales. Both can be accessed through their official website, https://www.bubsbookstore.com
For those eager to follow the store’s journey, the site also offers a monthly newsletter signup called “Bub’s Broadcast.”
“We want people to know that Bub’s Bookstore is a space where they can just exist, and they don’t have to feel the pressure to buy anything,” Fuller said, adding that everyone is welcome through their doors.
