It’s time. Columbia needs an independent bookstore. All Good Books will be a place where you can purchase the books you want to read. It will be a place where you can browse, chat with our enthusiastic and well-read booksellers, learn more about what you might enjoy, find surprises in the new releases and the best-sellers you may have missed, or discover obscure or esoteric good books deep in the shelves.
All Good Books will host and promote the many amazingly talented authors in and around Columbia, including those affiliated with the University of South Carolina, Allen University, Benedict College, and Columbia College and other educational institutions in the area; and it will be a beacon that attracts authors from around the state, country and world to visit Columbia and share their work with our community. All Good Books will reflect and seek to engage the full Columbia community—and the success of All Good Books requires this engagement.
We will continue to foster all the relationships Odd Bird Books has forged over these past few years, while allowing for more community outreach and engagement, and creating a welcoming space to foster reading and the local literary community. In addition to selling books, All Good Books will feature a “Reading Room” for customers to sit and read, and that will serve as an event space to host author book talks and other literary gatherings, including book clubs and discussion groups. The store will offer drinks and snacks — brewed coffee, iced lattes, and tea, along with wine and beer, plus assorted other drinks and light snacks.
A magical children’s area will feature materials for the next generation of readers, and comfortable inviting reading nooks for kids to read, with or without the adults who bring them, and will be adjacent to an exciting young adult and middle years section.
Our name is inspired by our aspirations — a store for Columbia that has all the good books that Columbia should get to read — and by an essay Ernest Hemingway wrote that captures, for us, some of what all good books have to offer. He wrote:
All Good Books will be located at 734 Harden Street, which is currently undergoing renovations and a historic rehabilitation. The space will feature approximately 1,900 square feet of retail space, a 1,000 square foot Reading Room / event space, and a 200 square foot closed garden.
