Bookshop Memories — Hester Books, Lubbock, Texas

Hester Books — Lubbock, TX

I moved to Lubbock, Texas for graduate school at Texas Tech University in 2003, and I was surprised by how many used bookshops there were. Not only paperback exchanges but a few real, excellent used bookshops too. Three of them in fact. All of them sprinkled along the same street. Two of them not too far from each other and the last just a bit further east.

Hester’s was perhaps the largest, and almost certainly the best known in Lubbock. Run for many years by Ross Hester, he was in his eighties, maybe even close to ninety in those days. His daughter, Renee, ran it day-to-day. Both were friendly and as chatty or quiet as you needed them to be. Mr. Hester didn’t do much at the store, but he would still come by regularly, shuffling to his desk near the center of the shop and telling great old stories about living in Lubbock and World War II. Still a nearly dry town, you could buy alcohol from taxi drivers back during the War, according to him.

Behind a bright blue door, Hester’s was bright and tiled. The shelves were white too. At least, that’s how I remember it. They had a good mix of books, dividing the large store about in half between fiction and non-fiction. There was also a long, low shelf that ran in from the entrance in the middle of the store of freebies you could help yourself…