New chapter for racially diverse bookstores: Steady growth, wider reach
When Nikki High quit her corporate communications job last year to open a bookstore in Octavia E. Butler’s Southern California hometown, it made perfect sense to name it after the prize-winning science fiction writer.
Ms. High was a kid growing up in Pasadena when Ms. Butler was a young adult. She likes to imagine they crossed paths in grocery stores or the large central library they both considered a haven. As a teen, Ms. High read “Kindred,” Ms. Butler’s 1979 classic novel about time travel and slavery. And she turned to it again and again as an adult. She recommended “Parable of the Sower” to book-loving friends long before it hit bestseller lists and was singled out for its prescient themes of climate change and racial and political tensions.
Octavia’s Bookshelf opened Feb. 18 in a
