Reading in Public Bookstore + Cafe in West Des Moines, Iowa was born out of the COVID-19 pandemic.    

Opened just last month, founder Linzi Murray remembers the exact moment she decided she would take the plunge into the business of bookselling.

“I was asking myself, can I do this? Am I even capable of opening a bookstore? I know nothing about business. I have actively never wanted to own a business. I don’t like math, I don’t know numbers, I don’t know how to manage people,” she said.

And yet, this felt like a calling for Murray.

As she and her husband weathered the lockdown in Brooklyn, N.Y., she began organizing open-air meetups with book lovers, where they’d exchange titles and recommend favorites to one another.  

Murray told me she was trying to replicate the peace and sense of homecoming she experienced when she walked into her favorite bookstores in New York City.

Which is why you’ll find elements of those Gotham stores on 5th Street in West Des Moines.  

The built-in book nooks are her favorite places in the store.   

“They were my original idea,” she says. “When I was planning the store, the words I was using were wander and gather. It was important to me that people felt like they could stay.”

You’ll find titles in multiple languages side by side on the shelves, a variety of books on neurodiversity and a robust section on grief. 

“Grief and the discussion of grief is really important to me,” she says.

Murray, who was adopted from China, endured the death of her father when she was in college. She believes that readers can connect over grief in some unexpected ways.

“I have a grief book club,” she says. "We don’t read sad books about losing someone.  We read 'The Dead Romantics,' so playing with grief makes it less isolating.”

Do you have a favorite indie bookstore in the Midwest?  Tell me about it on Twitter @KerriMPR.
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— Kerri Miller | MPR News