The downtown used book emporium on Main Street is known only as “The Bookstore.” Shelves of beach reads and classic hardcovers, some dating as far back as the Victorian era, rest flush against walls of exposed brick and local art.
As much as the shop might seem to stand outside of time, The Bookstore, celebrating its 50th year in business, gives a snapshot of today’s Chico.
“This is an everybody bookstore,” said Muir Hughes, who has owned the place with her husband Josh Mills for more than a decade. “So any kind of person can kind of walk through the door and probably find something of interest to them.”
When Ronald Barrett opened The Bookstore in 1976, the store was on Broadway, and in the 70s, the 118 Main Street location was a pizza parlor and beer spot. Barrett, who died in 2025, opened his doors with $800 of used books, according to his obituary. Mills worked alongside Barrett, and eventually became the manager of the store before he and Hughes took over the business 14 years ago.
The Chico community made it possible for The Bookstore to continue on with a change of hands through a crowd-funding effort in support of Hughes and Mills.
For Hughes and Mills, who grew up and raised their two kids in Chico, the bookstore is “a de facto visitor center for Chico.” The bookstore, Hughes explained, draws in locals and visitors alike. “Communities need to have bookstores as places of information, curiosity, and learning,” Hughes said.
While some booksellers specialize in one niche, The Bookstore goes broad, becoming, in Hughes’s view, a place to understand different perspectives. “We think more information is better. And that challenging our ideas that we hold is very powerful,” she said.
As such, Hughes feels that she has a perspective on the highs and lows that community members have experienced. “There’s a lot of sharing that takes place in a bookstore,” she said.
Sitting behind the register over the years has given Hughes a front row seat to changes in Chico, and shifted her view on the challenges the city faces. “Struggles are amplifying for a lot of people,” Hughes said, but “when we have visitors that come to Chico and they appreciate all of the unique attributes of this community, it gives me a lot of community pride.”
Through the bookstore doors, Hughes has seen visitors and newcomers fall in love with Chico — and sometimes, each other.
“People have proposed in here,” Hughes said. “It has been a place where people come when they are visiting loved ones that live here, and they themselves have moved far away.” One such browser in The Bookstore was Seena Clowser, who lives in Honolulu but was visiting her mom and sister in the area.
“You never know what’s going to blow in. Just being around books, it’s such a good feeling,” Clowser said on a recent Wednesday afternoon.
Clowser’s eyes twinkled over the expansive children’s section as she thumbed the pages of the Moomin book she planned to gift. “I think we lose something with all that digital interface from buying and selling,” she said.
She recalled bringing books into the shop in exchange for cash or credit when she lived in the area.
The Bookstore’s visitors echo the desire for physical media in the digital age. “AI is changing things very rapidly for our world,” Hughes said.
When people want to slow down “and to really inhabit their world and have some agency about what’s going on, that can be as simple as purchasing a paper, hard copy of a book.”
The books on the shelves at The Bookstore, Hughes said, counterbalance “digitized copies or summarized information that is often flawed.
“It’s becoming harder and harder to know what is real. And so when you’re looking at older books, that’s a great antidote for that,” Hughes said, perched beside texts with leather bindings and amber pages.
“Bookstores are one of those places that you can kind of be in the real world, and it’s not curated for you, but you actively are part of the discovery and treasure-seeking, adventure aspect.”
When it comes to change in Chico, downtown is at the center of the conversation. Between 50 years and two locations, The Bookstore has faced these shifts.
“I don’t think it’s as dire as it seems at moments,” Hughes said, explaining that while the bookstore sees a lot of activity, and that downtown Chico is full of life, “the biggest change is consistency.”
From what Hughes has noticed, the parking kiosks changed the pattern of visitors to downtown. Hughes maintains that what would help downtown the most is getting businesses into vacant spaces. “That would make a huge, huge shift,” she said.
For Hughes, The Bookstore’s rows of memoirs, novels, maps and picture books are a microcosm of Chico. “Bookstores are reflective of their communities. It’s in some ways like a mirror to other things that are happening,” Hughes said.
“We each have that kind of agency to participate in our communities.”
Whether leafing through the pages of a book or meeting community members in the flesh, “There’s always discovery,” she said.
“Just being a part of this continuum of life feels like a blessing.”
Katherine Kihiczak is a California Local News fellow reporting for ChicoSol.