Recluse books 🐌

Recluse Books has cultivated something increasingly rare: a bookstore that honors both the solitary act of reading and the communal space books can create. 

James Webster and Josie Smith-Webster opened the Fort Worth store earlier this year, bringing their decade of bookselling experience from New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles to a growing Texas city hungry for literary curation. 

I talked with Webster about his background in bookselling, Recluse’s most popular titles, and what he’s reading right now. — Maya Lerman

This conversation has been edited and condensed

Maya Lerman: So tell me how you ended up opening a bookstore in Fort Worth.

James Webster: My wife Josie and I actually met because we were working at the same bookstore, Book Culture on 112th Street up by Columbia in New York City. I worked there for a couple years, Josie worked there for about a year. She was also at Greenlight for a little while. We've been booksellers in Chicago and LA as well—we've been all over.

About the time we found out we were going to have a kid, she wanted to move back to Texas to be closer to her family, which made sense to me. We moved down here and were watching the construction of this building happening, just saying to ourselves, "That would be kind of the perfect spot to open our store." About a year later, here we are. It's been a journey all over the country.

ML: What's it like for a bookstore to find a home in Fort Worth and interact with that community and culture?

JW: Part of why we did this was because there wasn't really a thriving bookstore community here. There are two other indies and a Barnes & Noble, and the other ones very much serve their specific neighborhoods. One of them is only open from 9 AM to 5 PM, which means if you work, you don't go to that store. It's very kid-focused and really caters to stay-at-home parents and people providing childcare in that neighborhood. The other one has a bit more of a religious bent to it. We realized there was a lack of just a general interest indie bookstore.

Fort Worth is one of the fastest growing cities in America right now—allegedly economically and demographically about where Austin was 25 years ago. It has this feeling like it's about to get very crowded, with tons of new people moving here all the time and lots of new money going into development. We didn't really know what to expect.

We've found that people are good, curious readers. If they're stuck in a niche of science fiction or romance or whatever, it's just because they haven't yet found the thing that will open the doors a little bit. A lot of people have gotten back into reading post-pandemic and have enjoyed catching up on stuff they've missed. For example, romance novels are really normal now—somebody figured out a good way to market those and it's no longer Fabio on a horse. There's a hunger, a curiosity. People want to read good books.

Our store is about 1,100 square feet with about 6,000 books. Josie and I know pretty much every book in the store, which is a lot to keep in your head, but we have about ten years of experience between us. You pick things up by osmosis and can use that to build out your recommendations even if you haven't read all the books. If we haven't read a book, chances are we know someone who has.

When somebody comes in and says, "Hey, I really love romance novels, but I'm looking for something a little different," we can say, "Okay, here's this other thing that's going to tick a couple of familiar boxes but also introduce you to something new." Whereas the Amazon algorithm is just going to feedback loop you into more romance novels. What people are looking for right now in an increasingly automated and algorithmically curated cultural space is stuff that feels like it was hand-selected—where there was a human touch to it. I think that's something our bookstore is really good at providing.

ML: Do you have any specific instances of interactions with customers that have really stuck out to you?

JW: We had somebody come in and buy the new book by Marlen Haushofer, Killing Stella. This person came in, bought the book, and then came back that afternoon to buy her other book because she was so impressed with this little novella that she'd read in a single sitting. She'd never heard of it, but we had it on our new release table. She said she never would've picked this up otherwise—it was so outside of what she normally reads. We've created somebody who likes weirdo literary fiction now. That's what it's all about.

There have been similar instances where somebody picks up an author they haven't read before and then comes back to get the rest of that person's books. We had somebody who'd never read Helen DeWitt before, so we sold them The Last Samurai, and a couple days later they came back for all three of her other books.

Being in Texas, we've had a couple people come in and ask for LGBT-centered fiction and nonfiction, and they've asked in a hushed voice. It's like, no, this is a place for that. For the most part, everybody's been very cool, very chill. Everybody that comes in says how happy they are to have this bookstore, which is great.

ML: I wanted to talk about the name and the logo. How did you come up with it?

JW: The name has a three-pronged meaning. It's Recluse Books because there have been a lot of noteworthy literary recluses—Salinger, Pynchon, Dickinson. There's a lot of them. We wanted to honor the weirdos of literary history a little bit.

Two, there's so much focus on the reclusive writer, but reading is also a reclusive, solitary activity. It requires you to focus on something and be alone with the words if you're really going to do it well. 

The third part was a little bit tongue-in-cheek. We really believe in the bookstore as a communal neighborhood space. All of our event programming so far has been book clubs and an open mic night—things where we're really trying to invite people into the store for no reason other than to come hang out. So "recluse" was an ironic joke that we want to be a place where people can come to be around other people.

Once we settled on the name, the branding became a different issue. We worked with a graphic design group based in Ohio called Edelmade that Josie's uncle introduced us to. They were great—they really understood the vision of what we were going for with the handmade quality to all the graphics, the textured, almost zine-like aesthetic.

We thought about doing a spider holding eight books, one in each leg, but a lot of people are weirded out by spiders. We started thinking about reclusive animals—hermit crab seemed too obvious. The final contenders were a snail and a bat wrapped in its wings. We went for the snail because reading is a slower-paced activity, and we liked the idea of the snail having a little house. They designed the little snail for us and we love it.

ML: I saw the logo on Twitter and it really stuck out to me. Do you get a lot of demand for merch?

JW: We have tote bags and t-shirts. There has been decent demand for merch so far, which has been cool. But we are very much first and foremost a bookstore. We don't do coffee—we want the books to be the thing. We do merch, but only a limited amount. We'll have one t-shirt design at a time or a baseball hat. It's a fairly limited selection, which we do on purpose because we want the books to be the thing.

ML: Tell me about the interior. What went into the decor, the layout? What kind of space did you try to cultivate?

JW: We wanted it to be very navigable. Obviously we're parents, so it needed to be stroller-friendly. It's fairly open—the shelving goes along either wall with little end caps that jut out into the room. We chose primarily warm colors to offset the concrete-ish floor. We knew we wanted wood shelves, so we used Franklin Fixtures out of Tennessee. They're recommended by the American Booksellers Association. Everything is handmade and was driven down to us from outside Nashville. It was pretty exciting the day all the shelves showed up.

We put a lot of thought into how the sections are laid out, in what order, where in the store they are. We did a lot of planning based on other stores we love. We were thinking about stores with similar layouts—Volumes in Chicago is a very long, narrow store, and Community in Park Slope is also a very long, narrow store. We got to piggyback a little bit off work other people had already done.

There was so much math involved. Thankfully, Josie is very math-brained. Her calculations on how many books could fit on each shelf and how many shelves would go in each bookcase were ridiculous. I'm always in awe of her when it comes to that.

We've got chairs for people to sit and read. As a community space, we encourage you to come in and hang out. I always encourage the first-page test on a book. The line we like to tell people is that the books work better if you open them.

ML: Have there been any bestsellers that have surprised you? Have you learned anything about trends in the literary world from being in the physical space?

JW: All of our bestsellers tend to be the things that we ourselves are very good at pitching to people. Our bestsellers currently are Happy Hour by Marlowe Granados and The Bee Sting by Paul Murray, which is a 650-page tragicomic family saga. It was a finalist for the Booker. Who doesn't love a dramatic Irish family novel? My staff recommendation card talks about how it all builds toward the final sentence of the book, which basically knocks the earth off its axis. I read it three years ago and I still haven't recovered. The genius of it is that it won't mean anything to you if you haven't read everything up to that point.

We've also sold a lot of copies of Worry by Alexandra Tanner, which I tell everyone is the first truly great millennial novel. It's just about being in your late twenties and having no plan—what are you going to do, the things you do for your family members just because they're your family members. It's a great Brooklyn dirtbag book. Nobody's writing better dialogue than Alexandra Tanner. She has such a great ear for the way people talk in real life.

ML: One last question: Do you consider yourself a recluse?

JW: Yes and no. Yes, in that I spend a lot of time inside, but no, because I spend a lot of time on the internet. It's a weird sort of splitting the difference. I think Camus says something about how man refuses to be what he is—he wants to be a solitary creature, but can't be. Everybody likes the idea of being self-contained, the Walt Whitman "multitudes" containing person, but I don't think that's realistic now or ever. Josie, my wife, is definitely not a recluse. She needs to see other people or she starts to get a little stir-crazy. 🐌

WHAT JAMES AND JOSIE ARE READING

• Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, The Selected Stories of Bette Howland

• Dwelling by Emily Hunt Kivel

• The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish by Katya Apekina

• The Material by Camille Bordas

• The "Eris Gems" series

• Caps Lock: How Capitalism Took Hold of Graphic Design, and How to Escape from It by Ruben Pater

• Death to the Bullshit Artists of South Texas by Fernando A. Flores