![]() “Sometimes, people think that a Black-owned business is for Black people only. And it won't be tomorrow, either.”īut, above all, The Tiny Bookstore is for everyone, not just people of color. And it's important to have a resource where someone with that life experience and perspective is picking the books. My life experience as a Black woman has an effect on what books I find interesting and feel that I can relate to or otherwise want to share. “Value judgments are made all the time when someone chooses what to carry in their store. “Any store you shop with reflects the personal values and experiences of the owner to some degree,” says Lea. ![]() Especially one that chooses its book selection based on what the owner, a Black woman, finds to be meaningful and exciting, instead of what is simply going to sell well. That’s why it’s important to have a Black-owned bookstore in an extremely segregated city like Pittsburgh. And one of the things I'm passionate about is making the world just and fair.” The Tiny Bookstore is my way of sharing knowledge with the community. We are sources of knowledge for the community. Gender bias, sexual orientation bias, and violence against the LGBTQIA community are all real. “If you don't acknowledge the problem and do what you can to take a stand, then you're complicit in allowing the problem to continue. The Tiny Bookstore “In my opinion, you can't really be neutral when it comes to injustice or inequality,” says Lea. Until the world reaches a place that this is no longer true, we will continue to speak out against inequality.” Race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation have an effect on how people are treated. A yellow box on the right side of reads: “The Tiny Bookstore is race-neutral, but we know that the world is not. Still, Lea’s goal for The Tiny Bookstore is to serve everyone. “The fear that an experience at my store may keep someone from shopping with another person of color? That's what worries me the most.” “The weight that I feel from it is I worry that if there are any issues, people will see that as a sign that the experience at a Black-owned business isn't as good or reliable as the experience that they get at a business that isn't owned by a person of color,” she says. And while that title comes with loaded responsibility, Lea says it doesn't feel much different from being Black in America in general. The North Hills shop is the only Black-owned bookstore in Pittsburgh. Even after The Tiny Bookstore made Oprah’s national list of “Black-owned businesses people should be aware of” last fall. ![]() It’s tiny, and she likes it that way Lea has no intention of opening a bigger location. ![]() “Aside from one of the shorter bookcases being moved about eight feet to the left,” says Lea. The store’s layout hasn't changed much since it opened almost three years ago with the limited amount of space. “While I was doing that, I started to look into what it would take to sell new books, too,” she says. As she started figuring out how to sell books out of the space, Lea also started acquiring more used books to sell. The idea evolved pretty quickly from there.”Īt first, Lea’s goal was to finally sell some of the old books she had been holding onto. With the nature of our practices, neither one of us spent much time at the office, so my feeling at the time was that we might as well use the space to thin out my collection. “When I saw the space, it occurred to me that I could sell some of my book collection in our office space. “I've always loved books and dreamt of opening a bookstore when I retired,” says Lea. Both Lea and Bill are full-time criminal defense attorneys who stumbled across The Tiny Bookstore’s location in 2018 while looking for new office space. This mentality may stem from the fact that The Tiny Bookstore isn’t The Bickerton’s primary income source. … Because my goal isn't to just promote bestsellers or even books that I think are going to sell well.” “I think the reason why it's hard to identify the theme is because the only thing that really ties everything together is that I go with what interests me. “One comment we often hear is that it's difficult to identify what the theme of the store is but that we have a lot of interesting things here,” says Lea. Lea, who curates the store’s selection, chooses only to carry and promote books that appeal to her. At just under 300 square feet, and tucked away in the center of Pines Plaza shopping center in Ross, patrons at The Tiny Bookstore won’t find an aisle devoted to popular novels or New York Times bestsellers. Lea Bickerton, owner of The Tiny Bookstore Lea and Bill Bickerton, the husband and wife team behind The Tiny Bookstore in Pittsburgh’s North Hills, have a running joke that the store is Lea’s baby.
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