Patricia Elzie-Tuttle is a writer, podcaster, librarian, and information fanatic who appreciates potatoes in every single one of their beautiful iterations. Patricia earned a B.A. in Creative Writing and Musical Theatre from the University of Southern California and an MLIS from San Jose State University. Her weekly newsletter, Enthusiastic Encouragement & Dubious Advice offers self-improvement and mental health advice, essays, and resources that pull from her experience as a queer, Black, & Filipina person existing in the world. She is also doing the same on the Enthusiastic Encouragement & Dubious Advice Podcast. More of her written work can also be found in Body Talk: 37 Voices Explore Our Radical Anatomy edited by Kelly Jensen, and, if you’re feeling spicy, in Best Women’s Erotica of the Year, Volume 4 edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel. Patricia has been a Book Riot contributor since 2016 and is currently co-host of the All the Books! podcast and one of the weekly writers of the Read This Book newsletter. She lives in Oakland, CA on unceded Ohlone land with her wife and a positively alarming amount of books. Find her on her Instagram, Bluesky, and LinkTree.
Today’s book recommendation is a newer nonfiction release that just came out in November 2025. I am very fortunate to live in the same town as Marcus Books, the oldest Black-owned bookstore in the United States, and I go there as often as I can. One of the many allures of a Black bookstore for me is that I will always, without fail, find books there that I don’t see at any other bookstore. Even so, my knowledge of Black bookstores is incredibly limited to my personal experience, and today’s book recommendation is a deep dive into the rich history of Black bookstores as not only retail spaces, but spaces for community and revolution.
Black-Owned: The Revolutionary Life of the Black Bookstore by Char Adams
Char Adams is a journalist and former NBC news reporter. In February 2020 she published an article titled, “Black-Owned Bookstores Have Always Been at the Center of the Resistance.” In the process of doing the research for this article, she not only interviewed many Black booksellers but also found that relevant information was in many disparate places. There was no central archive, no sole, specialized place, to access this history, and this is the story of how this book came to be.
The history of the Black bookstore in the United States reaches further back into history than many of us realize, and Adams begins with the story of a man very few have heard of: David Ruggles. With this, the author also anchors readers in understanding that since the very genesis of the Black bookstore, it has been central to Black resistance movements since the 1830s. To remind you of context, this is prior to emancipation when it was illegal in some places for enslaved Black people to even learn how to read.
Adams explores Black bookstores chronologically and the majority of focus is during the 1960s, 1990s, and 2020s—times where Black bookstores had their impacts in civil rights movements front and center. There hasn’t been a solid accounting of the number of Black bookstores in the U.S. and not every single Black bookstore is named in this book. Some get more focus than others because of their roles in certain events and the book not only includes an extensive bibliography but also a list of Black bookstores that are still open, categorized by state.
English (US) · 