Third Place Books staff help bookstore live up to its name

Neighborhood Reads

It began, appropriately enough, with a book. Seattle-area real estate developer Ron Sher became infatuated with Ray Oldenburg’s 1989 book “The Great Good Place,” which argued that late 20th-century America was lacking in “third places” — spaces separate from home and work where people could gather, share ideas and spend time together.

Sher found an underperforming mall in Lake Forest Park that he believed would be the perfect location for the community hub he envisioned. In November of 1998, Third Place Books opened — a sprawling 15,000-square-foot new and used bookstore alongside a large food court offering coffee, baked goods and heartier restaurant fare. A nonprofit organization called Friends of Third Place Commons hosts hundreds of free events in that shared space every year, from dance recitals to book clubs to concerts.

In 1999, Sher brought on longtime independent bookseller Robert Sindelar to oversee the operation, and Third Place has since expanded into two more locations in Ravenna and Seward Park. On any given weekend you’ll find hundreds of people filling the stores exactly as Sher intended. They’re not just there to buy books — they’re there to meet, engage in shared activities and commune.

Erin Ball, the store manager of the Lake Forest Park location, has worked at an independent bookstore in Tucson, Ariz., and a mall Waldenbooks. When she’s looking to hire a new bookseller who fits the mission statement of Third Place, bookstore experience isn’t the most important criterion.

“I’m looking for a mix between passion and work ethic, but that can be from another realm,” she says. “One of my best employees worked at a canning factory in Alaska before she started here.”

Before the pandemic, Ball explains that workers at Lake Forest Park used to be highly specialized, with some primarily buying used books and others working in the receiving department. But now, she says, everyone in the staff of 25 booksellers “does a little bit of everything. It helps people enjoy their jobs more,” and it gives them a broader holistic sense of the store.

Ball previously worked at the Ravenna branch of Third Place Books, but she prefers the nonstop energy of Lake Forest Park.

“There is so much going on here,” Ball says. “We have we have more events and bigger events, so there’s always something happening, and I just love that feeling.”

As the marketing manager at Third Place, Rosa Hernandez is always searching for new ways to convey the “third place” ethos on social media. She routinely posts videos on Instagram of Third Place booksellers recommending their new favorite titles straight to the camera. “People really want to know the face behind the book recommendation,” she explains.

Hernandez’s central goal with those posts is to share “the books that we’re talking about and that we want our customers to start talking about among their friends and neighbors.”

Hernandez also finds “uncommon places where you might not otherwise find a book,” allowing Third Place to find new audiences. A recent favorite pairing of hers was a pop-up bookshop outside the Seattle Public Theater at Green Lake as a fundraiser for the theater. The last thing that urban hikers and bicyclists circumnavigating the lake expected to encounter was an open-air bookstore, she explains, and that delight in the act of discovery helped introduce new audiences to Third Place.

One of the central ways Third Place Books promotes conversations in the community is through its readings and event programming, which totals about 300 events a year for audiences ranging from the single digits to a maximum of 800 people in the Third Place Commons.

Spencer Ruchti, the store’s author events manager, is responsible for “scheduling and curating and booking author events for all three Third Place Books locations,” including ordering books for events and planning event logistics.

In a city full of literary events, it’s hard to create a distinct voice for a reading series. Ruchti says Third Place’s specialty is hosting "a lot of popular genre authors,” including “fantasy, sci-fi, romance and romantasy” authors “who have enormous audiences.”

But Third Place has impressed publishers enough with its handling of those events that the store increasingly draws some of the biggest names in the literary community. At a recent reading by novelist Ocean Vuong, “the whole store was just flooded with young artists and poets and readers who are also people of color,” Ruchti says, and the event helped them discover “this enormous institution on the north end of Lake Washington” for the first time.

Not every reading is a wall-to-wall banger, but Ruchti says “to see people continue to come out to an event every day is a little bit of a miracle.” Even if two people attend a reading by a first-time author, “you never know if the two people in attendance are leaders in their community who then go out and tell their community about your store.”

Each bookseller offered words of praise for other booksellers on the team, from the staff graphic designer to the community events coordinator who partners with local schools to the staff expert in children’s books. A bookstore can’t grow and foster a strong community unless its own internal community is healthy.

After 26 years, from his perch as managing partner of the three-store chain, Sindelar says, “I remain incredibly enthusiastic and optimistic about the place of bookstores in our lives.”

“The three stores are very different, but there’s an excitement that the staff shares, which I feel incredibly grateful for,” he says. “But there’s even more excitement from the customers.” Whether they’re grabbing a coffee, attending a reading, or just hanging out and playing chess with friends, Third Place is “a meaningful part of their day.”

Which, of course, is the whole point of a third place. 

What are Third Place booksellers reading?

Robert Sindelar, managing partner: “‘Brother Brontë' by Fernando Flores, is a special addiction. It takes place in 2038 in a town in Texas very close to the border. Just to give you an idea, the novel opens on a young woman cleaning up her house because the police raided it last night and took all her books. It’s beautiful, it’s frightening, but it’s weirdly hopeful.”

Rosa Hernandez, marketing manager: "‘One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This’ by Omar El Akkad is about reckoning with the American empire. This is probably one of the best books I have read in years, a really powerful book that will make you rethink how you consume media and the news."

Erin Ball, store manager: “Evie Wyld wrote ‘All the Birds, Singing,’ and her latest is called ‘The Echoes.’ She writes women characters in a way that is so honest and, I think, unusual. This one’s about a woman whose partner has recently died and so the chapters alternate between his ghost and her trying to move on. The ghost is finding out all of these things about his partner that he didn’t know and it’s just fascinating.”

Spencer Ruchti, author events manager: “Robert Macfarlane, the British naturalist, has a new book coming out called ‘Is a River Alive?’ It’s about the history of the rights of nature movement and of course, in his signature style, he seems to find hidden fascinating people all across the planet from just a crazy diverse number of walks of life. He’s coming to the store on June 12 and it feels like to a lot of our booksellers like a Second Coming. People are just like, ‘I can’t believe it’s happening.’”