Blue Bicycle Books, Charleston, SC

Connecting readers and writers for more than two decades, Blue Bicycle Books is Charleston’s premier locally-owned bookstore. Founded in 1995 as Boomer’s Books by Lee and Jim Breeden, we became Blue Bicycle Books in April 2007 when local writer and longtime employee Jonathan Sanchez bought the store. We are a New York Times-reporting shop with an event space that comfortably holds 75 people for talks and twice that many for signings; we host over 200 authors for events each year.

Not just YALLFest: We host a long-running Piccolo Spoleto reading, our annual Bridge Run Show staff reading, a writing camp for kids that runs all summer, and of course, YALLFest, Charleston’s young adult book festival, which annually draws 70 top YA authors and 12,000 fans to Upper King Street the second weekend of November.

Have Square will travel: Our crackerjack offsite team will set up shop at private homes, conventions, bars, restaurants, guerrilla dinners, boats — you name it, we’ve sold books there.

Our stock: True to our roots as a used bookstore, we have great military history, lots of trade paperback fiction, a beautiful classics section, and many others. We sell modern firsts (signed Vonnegut, Harper Lee and Tom Robbins), and have just about every new and used Charleston book ever written (there are a lot). We also carry many new books, including children’s books and cookbooks. It’s a big store — our 12 feet of King Street storefront belies a much longer space (172 feet long but who’s counting).