Member-only story
Bookshop Memories — The Book Inn, Lubbock, Texas
The Book Inn — Lubbock, TX
The Book Inn was run and owned by Kyle Hollingshead, known perhaps to Western pulp collectors as the author of a handful of ACE paperbacks back in the day. I never knew that until writing this essay and searching online to see if The Book Inn was still open. I doubted it since when I was going there regularly in the very early 2000s, Mr. Hollingshead was talking about retiring. It closed a few years ago.
The Book Inn was nice and as the name implies, homier, despite being located in one of Lubbock’s ubiquitous, soulless commercial strips. Inside, the shelves were double-stacked in every section, often with books stacked on top in each shelf as well. Books were piled on the floor, in the window, and on about any flat surface. It’s one of the “fullest” bookshops I’ve ever seen. Once you got into it, you walked delicately. “You’ll never know what you’ll find,” he’d say with genuine wonder in his voice.
It was almost always completely silent inside The Book Inn, minus the buzz of the fluorescent lights and the sound of traffic outside. The windows rattled when semi-trucks trundled down the street.
Of the general used book shops in Lubbock in the early 2000s, The Book Inn had the most serious theology-religion section, just inside the front door. Of course…
