The Book Loft of German Village

Store interior

The Book Loft of German Village is one of the largest independent bookstores in the United States,[5] with at least 500,000 books in stock and close to a million volumes available during Christmas holiday season.[4] A garden path lined with park benches leads to a patio with bargain books and the main entrance.[6] The store experience includes walking narrow hallways with stairways to multiple levels and the occasional dead end.[6] A map describing the contents of each of the 32 rooms is available for visitors.[6] The Book Loft covers 7,500 square feet of space, and along with books the store sells jigsaw puzzles, posters, and other merchandise.[7] Eighteen music systems each play different music to create a genre-specific soundtrack in each area.[8] The children's areas are the most popular rooms, according to owner Carl Jacobsma.[9]

Columbus area author Hanif Abdurraqib has described the sense of getting lost in the store as a formative experience, saying "It was important to read my way out of that maze... By the time I exited The Book Loft, I was able to imagine a different and better world than the one that I'd entered."[10]

One of the niches the bookstore fills is providing closeouts ("remainers") that are sold at a heavily reduced price.[7] The store provides a discount on every book sold in the store, with discounts ranging from 5% to 90%.[8]

The Book Loft offers multiple events a month such as author readings and signings, as well as sponsoring off-site events like comic book conventions.[11]

The store is located in red brick buildings dating to before the Civil War. 631 South Third Street once housed Maurer's Saloon and a nickelodeon movie theater called the Lily Cinema.[6][12] Living quarters were located on the second floor of what was known as the Substantial Building, which would go on to serve as a church, a decorating company, an art studio and school, and an indoor golf course.[12] In 1968 Marnie Southard opened a flower shop in one room of the building; later buying the entire building, she opened a larger art and antiques store and divided the rest of the building into six small shops.[12] She also bought the adjacent building at 632 City Park, which had opened as Wolf Tavern in the nineteenth century and through the years had served as a series of small groceries.[12] Southard created a block-long retail mall, building a new store connecting the two buildings, which was the original space of the Book Loft and now serves as its main entrance.[12]

Former teachers Carl Jacobsma and Roger Tompkins owned a gift shop in the mid-1970s, and in 1977 Marnie Southard asked them to join her in a retail venture.[8][12] Jacobsma and Tompkins opened a bookstore in one of the stores of Southard's mall;[12] at opening, the store was small, with two floors with a loft on top, providing inspiration for the store's name.[7] When neighboring shops went out of business, Tompkins and Jacobsma would buy the space, tear down the walls, and expand.[12] In a slow and steady process over the next fifteen years, they would repeat this process at least seven times, until the entire building was theirs.[12][9] In 1987 the shop's book buyer, Russell Iler, became co-owner of the store;[7] owner Roger Tompkins died in 2012.[13]

The Book Loft struggled with tight finances due to the rise of Internet retailers in the late 2000s;[13] since the mid-2010s, the business has recovered financially.[9]

• Official website