For Mia Beach, the journey started when she was a teenager.
White Rabbit Books, a bookstore in Muncie, is where she often found refuge.
“I was a troubled teen, and on my way to juvie,” Beach said. “That is the place where I spent a lot of my afternoons and a lot of my lunch hours. It was the last place that I was before I ran away from home.”
“It offered this quiet place to just be with books that I had never experienced before.”
Now, Beach is a part of a team opening a bookstore of their own. She hopes it will serve the community, as White Rabbit did for her.
Redbud Books, 408 W. Kirkwood Ave., is set to open on March 9. The nonprofit bookstore will be volunteer-led and focus on engaging the Bloomington community through curated book collections, reading groups, film screenings and various speakers and events.
“We really feel like it's important to create a spot where people can come together,” Beach said. “We want to add to what Bloomington has to offer and make Bloomington a more sustainable place to live long term, where there are places where you’re excited to go.”
The bookstore has already had several community events, such as film screenings and speaker events, despite construction ongoing inside the building.
“We’re already seeing from the number of people who have wanted to volunteer and who have been coming to the events before we've even opened ... that people feel like there's a need for additional spaces to find new books to inspire them and new places to have events, to meet other people,” Beach said.
The bookstore will feature highly curated sections, handpicked by community members. The sections will feature works focusing on everything from feminist literature and graphic novels to Rust Belt history and autotheory.
Teresa Kovacs, an Assistant Professor of Germanic Studies at Indiana University, is part of the bookstore’s collective and has already curated a section based on her theater expertise.
“It's not about putting all the books that would be in a standard bookstore,” Kovacs said.
“I want to pick and choose books, where, even if I would enter a bookstore as someone who works in theater and performance, I would say, ‘Oh my God, I didn’t even think about this one,’” she said.
Much like Beach, Kovacs’ aspiration to open a bookstore also stemmed from her childhood. While living in Europe, her mother would take her and her brother to a bookstore every week, allowing them to pick one book.
“For me it was always one of the most beautiful places to spend entire days,” she said.
Kovacs hopes that Redbud Bookstore will serve the community in the same way.
“(I am hoping) that people will talk about it when they talk about what made their lives in Bloomington beautiful,” she said.
One of the bookstore’s goals is to be sustainable. Beach says they hope to achieve this by selling a mixture of new and used books, as well as planting a tree for every book they sell.
