NY Times: “Groff and her husband, Clay Kallman, had toyed with the idea of opening a bookstore in Gainesville for more than a decade, but the timing never felt right. Groff’s writing career was taking off, and they had two young sons. But last year, as book bans surged across Florida, they decided that their town needed an independent bookstore where titles that had been purged from libraries and classrooms would be on prominent display.
“This store would probably still be a pipe dream if the book bans hadn’t happened,” said Groff, who has lived in Gainesville since 2006. “I want this for me too. I don’t want to live in a place where we stifle free expression.”
Last fall, they found an old building, a 2,300-square-foot former hair salon, on South Main Street in downtown Gainesville. They transformed it into a bookstore and event space, with a cozy reading nook in the children’s book section, a small cafe and large rolling display tables that can be wheeled away to make way for chairs.
For the front of the building, they commissioned a 60-foot-long mural of a lynx, a wildcat native to Florida, sitting sphynx-like next to the store’s motto: “Watch Us Bite Back.””