When I popped into Cowtown’s newest bookstore a few weeks back, I found a new refuge. A literary refuge.
Located at 465 S. Main St., Ste. 110, the refuge is Recluse Books, but the co-owners are anything but reclusive and the store itself is no isolated, nary-attainable Shangri-La. It’s airy, bright, and inviting. And it’s the brainchild of James and Josie-Smith Webster.
The couple met working at a bookstore near Columbia University in New York City.
“It was sort of a mix between new and used stuff,” James said, “We’ve worked at bookstores all over for the last couple of years and knew that we wanted to open a bookstore of our own.”
When the Websters were expecting their first child, they moved to Arlington, Josie’s hometown.
“She wanted to be closer to family,” James said.
The Websters lived on Rosedale Street, a couple of blocks from what would become Recluse Books.
“We were like, ‘Wow, that would be the perfect place to open a bookstore,’ ” James said. “And a year later, here we are.”
James, who grew up in Charlottsville, Virgina, is a big reader from way back.
“Reading has really been a lifelong interest for me,” he said. “My parents were both editors of magazines. My father wrote for National Geographic for a while. Interest in writing is just sort of in the blood, I guess. And brick-and-mortar book spaces matter. We want to be the kind of bookstore where you can find what you’re looking for … but we really want to be the kind of bookstore where you can come in and find something you didn’t know you were looking for. That’s sort of our philosophy. If we have a title you’re looking for, great, but we’d really like to foster curiosity in people and maybe send them along with something they haven’t heard of and they take home and they love, and it becomes one of their new favorite things.”
Photo By E.R. Bills
Turning people on to new books and ways of thinking is just one facet of James’ passion.
“One of my favorite things about writing and reading is that it allows me a window into how other people see and experience the world. It’s about language. I’ve been myself my entire life, and I think books are a valuable resource in terms of learning more about others, understanding different perspectives, and communicating how others view the world. How much can we know about something if we don’t know how to describe it? And I think that’s true of concepts and phenomena, as well. How much do you know about someone else’s life if you haven’t spent time with their story or paid attention to the way that they describe their lives.”
It was reminiscent of line from a George R. R. Martin character: “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.”
Recluse Books has been open only about three months, but the Near Southside community has embraced it. The store’s A Semester Abroad book club is pretty popular.
“Because Josie and I read a lot of translations,” James said, “we pick a country, and, for a couple of months, we read books from that country. We’re looking to ramp up activities and signings by this fall.”
Along with A Semester Abroad, Recluse also entices the community with a monthly zine club and open-mics.
I browsed. Bolano. Camus. DeLillo. Some established heavies, for sure, but also The Book Censor’s Library by Bothayna Al-Essa (a National Book Award finalist), The Atlas of Microstates (Zonan Nikolic), and The Blue Place, a Nordic noir thriller based in Atlanta (Nicola Griffith). Intrigued, I picked up all three. Then I asked James about a Texana section.
He was amenable but pitched it back to me: “Do we wanna have a specific Texas section? A Texana section? Texas and California are the lonely states with enough unique cultural history to have their own subsection. It becomes a question of, ‘Do you want to separate Texas writers and highlight them, or do you just want to take for granted that Texans are making significant contributions to fiction or historical nonfiction and other genres … and realize that you’ll find some of them on the shelves?’ ”
He had me there, and George R.R. Martin was right. There are hundreds if not thousands of lives to live in the stacks at Recluse Books, Texan and otherwise.
