Walking into Thank You Books in Birmingham, Alabama, is a book lover’s dream.
To the left is a display of new releases—updated every Tuesday—and colorful book covers fill the walls. The all-important recommendation cards peek out from shelves and range from new additions to a few that have survived four years in the shop, highlighting the titles that booksellers and co-owners can’t get out of their heads.
“It’s a very Instagrammable store, we’ve been told, but I do think that people come in here to just take a break from their screens and take a break from the pace of their regular lives,” says co-owner Kristen Iskandrian MA ’03, PhD ’09.
There are plenty of nooks where quiet shoppers browse and disappear, and there’s also always a friendly face—or three—ready to provide a recommendation.
“It was important for us that when you walk in, you know it’s a bookstore and not a gift shop,” says co-owner Laura Cotten AB ’12. “We love gift shops and quirky gifts, but we want to be really book-heavy.”
For the space, it’s a huge number of books that ranges from old favorites and bestsellers to poetry and small press. And all of them—6,000 titles when they first opened—were hand selected by Cotten, Iskandrian, and their third co-owner Elizabeth Goodrich.
“We literally picked them out title by title,” Iskandrian says. “We combed our own bookshelves. We had many conversations about what’s important to us. We asked our community, ‘What’s important to y’all?’ It was such an unscientific way to do it.”
Independent bookstores are a reflection of the people who work there. You can do what you want, and that’s empowering and exciting—and also really overwhelming at times.” — Kristen Iskandrian, co-owner of Thank You Books, an independent bookstore located in Birmingham, Alabama
It was also chaotic. Since its early days, the shop has curated its process, homing in on local tastes, refining selections, and making its mark in the community.
“Independent bookstores are a reflection of the people who work there,” Iskandrian says. “You can do what you want, and that’s empowering and exciting—and also really overwhelming at times.”
Just like its shelves, the shop’s calendar is also packed. Whether it’s a book club, author event, or story time, the store draws a crowd. Sometimes it’s a summer reading kickoff, complete with face painting and visitors milling between Thank You Books and a neighboring soda shop for an ice cream social. Other times, it’s a crowd sitting in folding chairs asking eager questions of a visiting author.
“We’ve called ourselves the neighborhood bookstore for a long time, but really having been here for four-and-a-half years now, we’re learning that we’re a part of the neighborhood more than we ever have been before,” Cotten says.
It all centers on a love of books. And that’s what brought Cotten, Iskandrian, and Goodrich together all those years ago. Although Cotten and Iskandrian’s time in Athens overlapped briefly, their friendship grew—and blossomed into a business—after they had moved away.
Iskandrian was living in Birmingham, and Cotten was in Ann Arbor, Michigan. A social media post musing over a dreamy local bookstore helped draw Cotten back to the Iron City, where she had earned a master’s in secondary English.
Thank You Books opened in late 2019, just a few months before the COVID-19 pandemic meant book purchases moved online and the shop’s carefully curated shelves were visible only through the windows.
“It was very much a ‘jump and build your wings on the way down’ process,” Cotten says.
It’s almost impossible to separate Thank You Books’ beginnings from the pandemic, Cotten and Iskandrian say, but those challenges also formed strong community bonds. To this day, readers will come into the store to say, “I started reading again around the time y’all opened.”
“We didn’t necessarily know that would happen, but now it has, and it’s the most rewarding thing that we hear,” Cotten says.
They’ve also seen the community grow, both through relationships with other local businesses and literally as their youngest patrons grow from babies to toddlers and from toddlers to young readers. But at the heart of the store a love of books remains.
Their biggest hope is that when a visitor reads “You Are Welcome” on the wall behind the register, they know without a doubt that it is true.
When Laura Cotten and Kristen Iskandrian opened Thank You Books in 2019, they hand-selected every book that appeared on their shelves. All 6,000 of them. They have a more curated process now, but it remains locally focused. (Photo by Peter Frey/UGA)