POCATELLO — For some people, there is nothing better than wandering around a bookstore, picking out a book that seems interesting, and then settling into a cozy nook to read for a while.
Two local women are working to make that a reality for Pocatello area residents. Both women are passionate about reading and want to give local residents that fate-like happenstance that occurs when people enter a bookstore instead of buying online.
Hares & Hatters Bookshop is the brainchild of Nicki Stanton and Jamie Robyn Wood. While they have the ultimate goal of opening a brick-and-mortar bookshop somewhere in the Gate City area, they are currently raising funds via quarterly book box subscriptions and an online bookstore.
The name Hares & Hatters Bookshop is inspired by the classic Lewis Carroll novel “Alice in Wonderland,” which includes a hare and The Mad Hatter as characters.
Stanton says she spent a long time researching names. She didn’t want a store with her last name, or something generic like Pocatello Books. Instead, she says, she was aiming for a name that would seem at home in the old streets of Europe. She wanted a name that evoked curiosity.
“It just felt like you would be walking down the street and there would be this Hares & Hatters Bookshop and you would just maybe wander in,” she said.
While Stanton says she doesn’t have a particular obsession with the book, there are a lot of Wonderland-related conceits they’ll be able to use in their bookstore.
“I like ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ but there's a lot of fun things that you can do with it,” she said. “There's great words … and the idea of being curious and the idea of being adventurous is also really appealing.”
THE SPARK
Wood’s and Stanton’s journeys to open a bookstore began separately before they merged in late 2021.
For Stanton, the idea began in the first half of 2020 when the beloved Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon, posted that the business might not make it. The 70,000-square-foot independent bookstore is one of the most well-known bibliophile havens in the country, and it was struggling to survive when COVID-19 lockdowns were in place. Like many people across the country, Stanton, who has family in Portland, began doing everything she could to try to keep the store afloat by making online purchases.
“I had a million books that I needed to read already, but I was buying T-shirts and stickers and all of that kind of stuff to try to save Powell’s Books,” she said.
That experience sparked something within her, and she decided she was going to try to visit as many independent bookstores as she could.
“So I started touring these independent bookstores and started falling in love with this idea of this community that they created and really wanting one here,” Stanton said. “As a reader, and as a writer, I always wanted a bookstore in Pocatello, but the idea of actually doing it myself had not really occurred to me until I started touring all these bookstores.”
Then she met the owner of a bookstore in North Idaho, and after talking for a while, the owner started giving her tips on how to start a shop of her own.
“No one in my family has ever started a business,” Stanton said. “I was like, ‘How do you pay taxes? How do you get books?’ I didn't even know how to get books.”
She began talking to the Small Business Development Center at Idaho State University’s College of Business. Their first piece of advice was to find out if people in Pocatello even wanted a bookstore. She says she felt silly because most of her friends are readers and writers, but she sent a survey asking if they’d be interested, and of course they said yes.
Around this time, Stanton had decided to go back to college to obtain her creative writing degree, so things got put on hold for a while after she took some initial steps such as registering her business with the state.
Stanton and Wood were just acquaintances at the time and knew each other through a writing group they attended as time allowed. In late 2021, when Stanton was nearly done with her degree, Wood reached out to her asking if she was serious about opening a bookstore.
“So we sat down and talked about it together,” Stanton said. “And she says, ‘I want to open a bookstore,’ and I said, ‘Well, if it wants to be called Hares & Hatters Bookshop, you're in luck, because I've already filled out a whole bunch of paperwork and registered the name Hares & Hatters Bookshop.’ It's been fun; it's gone super fast.”
For Wood’s part, she’d always wanted to open a bookstore, “but more in the picturesque bookstore-from-a-book way,” she said. Wood — who is a published young adult novelist and has a Master of Fine Arts degree focusing on children’s writing — didn’t want to do it alone and thus it was a dream that had been pushed aside. So when Stanton sent out that survey, it piqued her interest.
Wood’s biggest hope for their eventual brick-and-mortar shop is that it be a kind of community center. She and her family lived in Iowa for a while, and she was inspired by a bookshop there.
“There's a piano there and people come and do the storytimes and people come for readings or for poetry night or even for live music,” she said. “… I just think the feel of walking into an independent bookstore and having people there sharing what they've created is really powerful.”
'INVESTING IN A BOOKSTORE'
The biggest focus for Wood and Stanton right now is to raise enough money to open their physical store. To do that, they are focusing a lot on their quarterly book boxes.
There are two options — one that focuses on women’s fiction and another one for children.
The women’s fiction box — the Mad Tea Party Book Box — retails for $45 and will always contain a book, a selection of tea and other goodies. The Curiouser & Curiouser Children's Book Box retails for $40, and each box comes with a custom collectible pin, two books and more fun items.
“Our first two book boxes that we have in December are actually through contacts that we have through our writing communities,” Stanton said. “So it's been really fun to kind of draw some attention to stories that we think are really great that people probably aren't necessarily going to be exposed to.”
The December boxes are still available at haresandhattersbookshop.com while supplies last, and you’ll be able to pre-order the March boxes soon.
Stanton said they’ve been so excited about getting the book boxes into the hands of readers that if you live in the Pocatello area, they will personally deliver it instead of putting it in the mail.
“If you order in Pocatello, we’ve just been driving them to your house the second we get an order,” Stanton said. “It's actually been amazing because a couple of people have seen me coming up to their door and they’ve opened the door and it's been amazing to chat with them about books and about what they hope to see in a bookstore.”
If you’re an avid reader excited about the possibility of a new bookstore, there are a couple ways to help out.
“The idea is that every book box isn't (only about) getting a book box; it's investing in bringing a bookstore to Pocatello,” Wood said. “People say, ‘Oh, how can I help you open the bookstore?’ And the truth is, ‘Buy a book box.’”
The Hares & Hatters website also has a merch shop where you can get T-shirts, sweatshirts, stickers or a canvas tote bag. They also have an online shop at bookshop.org, a website that opened during the pandemic as a way to support independent bookstores and give readers a good online alternative to Amazon. If you buy books through the Hares & Hatters page, the bookstore gets 30 percent of the profits.
Additionally, the duo hosted their first pop-up bookshop during the December First Friday Art Walk at Glean Coffee Roasters in downtown Pocatello. They haven’t decided for certain where they’d like their shop to be located, so they’re planning on holding pop-ups at various locations throughout the area and see what the turnout is.
“We were really encouraged by the amount of excitement about having a little bookstore,” Stanton said. “We tried really hard to make (the pop-up) look as much like a bookstore as possible and tried to make it like an experience you would get in a bookstore.”
Wood says she didn’t fully understand the joy of helping people find their next favorite book until that first pop-up.
“I have a friend who works in a bookstore and she said, ‘My favorite thing about working at the bookstore is putting in someone's hands a book that will matter to them.’ And I'd been like, ‘Oh, that's a cute story,’” Wood said. “And then I told her after we did our first pop-up, when someone would ask, ‘Oh, I'm looking for this kind of book,’ and I would say, ‘Oh, this is the one that will be the one you're looking for,’ there is something really powerful in that — in helping people find what they're looking for.”
For now, the two aren’t cutting themselves checks — all the funds raised are going toward the brick-and-mortar shop. However, there has been one major perk for the two book lovers since opening the business.
“We pay ourselves by getting books delivered to our house. It's amazing,” Stanton said. “It’s actually very exciting to have this massive box of books being delivered to our houses. It was the best feeling ever.”
'BOOKS, COMMUNITY, AUTHORS, ACCESS'
There is one independent bookstore in Pocatello already — Walrus & Carpenter Books in downtown, which is also named after an “Alice in Wonderland” reference — but the two women say what they’d be offering is different enough that they wouldn’t be stepping on toes.
“Jamie's very passionate about the community aspect of it and building a community-centered thing,” Stanton said. “I'm a little more concerned if we're going to be able to pay the bills, and Jamie's like, ‘We’ve got to have a community space where people can come to where we can offer writing classes and book clubs.’ There's there's plenty things in Pocatello to do if your kids play sports, there's plenty of things in Pocatello to do if you like the outdoors, but if you are a reader and you're looking for a quiet nook somewhere where you can browse some books, that is a little bit hard to come by.”
Stanton says that even beyond potentially serving as community centers, bookstores also provide intangibles that online shopping cannot.
“What literature does and what books do in particular is that it allows us to step inside the mind and thoughts of other characters and gives us access to different perspectives, and so reading becomes really important,” she said. “But when we're trying to just buy books online from Amazon, for example, they have other agendas, and they continue to send us more and more of things that we already like and you lose that browsability option. So maybe we have a young reader who only reads fantasy but then they wander into a bookstore and then maybe they find a nonfiction book about somebody from history and they get exposed to something that they didn't even know they were interested in.”
Access to a diverse selection of perspectives is important, Stanton said.
“I think that 2020 taught us that we definitely need more voices instead of less voices,” she said. “And the pendulum is kind of swinging but it's not swinging in a way that's becoming more inclusive. It's just swinging into looking at different authors that definitely need time and attention but we need to make sure that that is broad — that we keep expanding what's available instead of narrowing it — because there's so many great stories out there.”
Additionally, independent bookstores have more access to all sorts of authors.
“Independent bookstores can offer traditionally published books from the big five publishers, independent books, and then we even have access to (other) books,” Stanton said. “Our next book box in March, for example, is going to be from an independently published author who doesn't have any ties to any sort of publishing company, and you will not be able to get that in a Barnes and Noble, for example. And those independently published books are incredibly hard to find online unless you specifically already know who that author is and what the book is.”
Wood added, “The book market is a strange one right now, and any way that you can add to it and create space instead of narrowing it down, to me it's beneficial and there's lots of ways to do that. So if a publisher is thinking of taking on a book, and they know they can't sell it to Barnes and Noble then they're going to be less likely to publish it, but the more independent bookstores there are that they know carry more varied titles then it becomes worthwhile to them to take that on. So it not only changes what people are reading, it actually changes what is publishing to have places open to selling different things.”
Next on the to-do list is to find a location to open up shop. They have a handful of ideas — including downtown Pocatello and the Northgate area on the north end of town — but they’ve been struggling to find an existing building that works or land where they can build their shop from scratch.
“We have very specific ideas of how we want the space to be used, so building our own space would be amazing,” Stanton said. “And we've been in contact with some other small business owners in Pocatello about doing things together. But it's hard to find land, places to build. There's just not a lot of space.”
Ideally, though, they’re aiming to open up shop sometime in 2023, but there are a lot of things up in the air — including whether the business will still fare well after the holiday season. That said, Stanton and Wood are optimistic.
“We're just trying to hustle to that space as fast as possible,” Stanton said. “And so it'll be books and community and authors and access, and it's gonna be all of the things that we love — and that we think would be great for our community, too.”
For more information, visit haresandhattersbookshop.com.