Author: Grace Li, San Jose, CA
Laura Gahrahmat is the owner of Hicklebee’s Bookstore, an award-winning independent bookstore located in San Jose, California. We sat down with her to ask her about running the bookstore, community involvement, and youth efforts.
Grace: Thank you for agreeing to do this interview with us! I’m Grace, the person that you’ve been in correspondence with, and also the co-editor-in-chief of The Megaphone. So, would you like to introduce yourself and also Hicklebee’s Bookstore?
Laura: Sure. I’m Laura Garamott, the owner of Hicklebee’s. Hicklebee’s is a children’s bookstore founded in 1979. And it’s been located in the Willow Glen neighborhood of San Jose since that time. I am the recent owner, I purchased the business from the founders in 2023.
Grace: That’s great! So we’re just going to jump into the questions now. First off, Hicklebee’s Bookstore has had a long history of community engagement through things like book drives, educator nights, and other literary events. So, how would you define the mission of this bookstore? And how does this mission guide you in your decisions regarding running the bookstore? We were also wondering how being a small business shapes the way you guys build community relationships.
Laura: Yeah, so I came to Hicklebee’s with a different background than the founders. So the founders—one of the main founders, Valerie Lewis—she was a reviewer of children’s books, and she had a long, really distinguished career in evaluating children’s books. She did that publicly for many years and she was also instrumental in really establishing an alliance with children’s booksellers in the Bay Area. So she left behind a really great legacy, and the store and all of the programs that they created were really tremendous for the community and for literacy.
My background was small business ownership and I had a passion for literature, in particular children’s literature, and I volunteered for organizations since college that supported literacy. As a parent, you know, I just engaged with the school community for programs that involve reading. So to me, what I thought was most important about Hicklebee’s is that it continued to be a resource for the community for children’s literature. And that really nothing changes, that we just keep it as is.
The community really depended on Hicklebee’s and still does for services to the community in partnership with the library system. We still do; we have authors in schools, we have book fairs in addition to the brick-and-mortar business. My mission, my goal, is to continue on all fronts. All of our services, and in particular the store, is to continue the mission of making sure that children have access to literature in the community.
And being a small business owner in this industry is very challenging. I feel grateful that the founders of the business really established a foundation where I can, you know, sort of continue on that mission and that legacy. As far as being able to continue that, it is really a tricky dilemma. And the founders went through that as well with the advent of online sales—well, big-box sales like Barnes and Noble, online sales like Amazon, the COVID pandemic—they had their own share of challenges. I just, at this point, I’m about to start year three. The mission of the business is still the same. We just try and make sure that we’re sort of true to that mission and, you know, put in the work to make sure that we’re providing the best possible literature and things for kids in the community.
Grace: Yeah. I think it’s great that your mission is to bring literacy into your community and, you know, it’s really great seeing how well connected the bookstore is with a bunch of different organizations and how it creates a pathway for increased literacy.
Laura: Yes, I agree.
Grace: So kind of on a similar note, I saw that an upcoming event that you guys are holding was the Nutcracker Storytime and Dance presentation with the San Jose Dance Theater. I was wondering if you could talk a bit more about this event and on how you engage with San Jose groups like this dance theater to promote arts and culture amongst youth and adults in our area.
Laura: Yeah, I think that people look to independent bookstores, not just Hicklebee’s, but people look to independent bookstores to be community spaces, open to everybody and a place where the community can gather. And for me personally, arts and culture are very important to supporting the community and especially supporting youth in the community.
So beyond literacy and just making sure that families have access to good books, obviously, as kids get older, they look for other ways to stay engaged in the community. And I think that the community owes it to the youth to continue to try and foster their growth. And I think arts and culture are the best way to do that. San Jose Dance Theater, in particular for me—I’m a big fan of theater and ballet. And we do, as a local business, we do get a lot of requests from different organizations to partner with them or work with them and of all varieties: sports, arts and culture, just local groups, local cultural groups.
And it can be tricky because you want to be a resource and you want to work with as many community members as possible. But I found that groups for arts and culture—ballet, music, theater—really dovetail nicely with the store and we’re usually able to sort of join forces in a way that is very easy and is appreciated by everybody. So like San Jose Dance Theater or Academy of Classical Ballet, or we’ve been doing events this year with California Children’s Musical Theater. And they come to the store and we’ll sometimes do events with them, and it’s just a good way to keep people interested in all of the things that are going on in families’ lives.
Kids work really, really hard for their art programs, and art programs, depending on the situation, don’t always have the proper funding, which is something that with books we share sort of a similar challenge. So if we can help arts and youth and their families, we’ll do it.
Grace: Yeah, that’s amazing. I think not only being able to spread literacy but also arts and culture in collaboration with different organizations is incredible.
Grace: Now, we were also wondering: what is a memorable author event that Hicklebee’s has had, and why would you say that it’s been memorable?
Laura: Okay. I thought about this in advance because we do a lot of events every year. And of course, this is the start of my third year. I would say that one of the more memorable events this year, we had the author Jonathan Stroud. He visited us in April. He had a new release, the legendary Scarlett and Browne. He’s a well-known author of a series called Lockwood & Co., and he’s from England. I had never read his middle-grade material before. I knew that he was popular, but when the event started to take shape—most of these events are planned well in advance, three or four months—I really had no idea how dedicated of a following he had for middle-grade literature and people who have grown up reading his books and they’ve shared it. Children and parents share the love of his books.
So when we had the event in April, it was a sellout. And we had people who came in from San Diego who flew in for the night. We were lucky enough during his national tour for the publisher and for him to choose Hicklebee’s as an event location in Northern California. So people had gotten on a plane, dedicated fans of his literature. I met a woman and her daughter who had matching tattoos based around the series.
I was so impressed with his dedicated and loyal fan base for middle grade, it was really incredible. The literature tends to be regional, so there are some authors that are really popular in some areas but not so much in others. And it was a total surprise to me. But when I got to meet Jonathan and his wife, Gina, who’s also a talented person in the book industry, I was just super impressed. They’re just the kindest people. And I just felt like it was a real feather in our cap to host them and I was very grateful and it was just a surprise. It was so cool. You never know how an event is going to turn out. You always want to have a good turnout for authors, so that was just such a nice surprise.
Grace: Yeah, that sounds really cool and it’s definitely great to see how dedicated their fans were!
Laura: Yes, I had no idea.
Grace: Yeah. And I think it’s also a sign of a good host that so many people from so many different places were coming to your bookstore in particular.
Laura: Yeah, I mean, some family had come in from Pismo Beach. I just felt lucky that Hicklebee’s is established enough and credible enough and dependable enough to be able to host an event like that. Yeah, and it was really sort of a really good reminder for me—there is a lot of literature out there. You don’t know what you don’t know. I didn’t know the depth of his following. It was really cool to see an author that I was unfamiliar with and enjoy being a part of their long history and just getting to meet their community. I thought that was very cool.
Grace: Yeah, that sounds really cool.
Laura: Yeah, that was the most memorable.
Grace: So, my next question was about the Teen Advisory Board. I was hoping you could introduce the board and speak a little bit about why it was created, and how youth in our area should try to further engage with Hicklebee’s.
Laura: Yeah. So the TAB (Teen Advisory Board), I had to ask the staff because I didn’t know when it was created since it was created by the founders. We didn’t really know exactly. I was looking back—we have a timeline on our website—but it isn’t mentioned in the timeline, unfortunately. So maybe I couldn’t get the exact date, but I think it was the early 2000s that they started the Teen Advisory Board. It was a very popular organization, a teen reading group. It went online during the pandemic and I think that, you know, with a lot of programming post-pandemic, it took a little dip.
And when I took the business in 2023, one of the goals was to reestablish the Teen Advisory Board and see how we could make it grow again. It was very important to me that Hicklebee’s expand its offerings in middle grade as well as YA. I think that obviously Hicklebee’s has a very dedicated community for young children, but it was important to me that middle-grade readers and high school readers felt comfortable coming to Hicklebee’s. It was the type of place that wasn’t just for toddlers and their parents.
She went to college this year, but one of the staff worked with me. She was a high school student at Willow Glen High School. And I just asked her, “Hey, you know, do you think you can work with me to help get this program up and running again and commit the time to being the program coordinator?” And to her credit, we worked together and sort of my goal was to help structure the teen advisory group but not be in charge of it—let the teens be in charge of it.
And that’s what it is. So we have sort of two sessions a year: the first one starting in August and going through December, and then January through May. And then we kind of take a hiatus in the summer. The group gets together and supports middle grade and YA books at the store by reviewing, reading advanced review copies of books, and reporting back to Hicklebee’s. What are the books that they liked? What would be great for the store to carry?
They help Hicklebee’s by writing “shelf talkers”—the little bits of information about a book that we put on the shelf to get people’s attention and help explain it a little bit. And they also participate in events. We don’t have a lot of teen events at the store because it’s very difficult to drum up interest at this time for a lot of teen events, but they were instrumental when The Hunger Games had a new release; they put together a great event which welcomed in people of all ages. But it was really a celebration for that new release. People have been waiting for the Hunger Games book for a long time.
I should say, I have a new Teen Advisory Board coordinator, and she’s a junior in high school and she’s carried on the work. She also participates in our preview nights where we present the new releases of the season to the community, and she contributes by doing reviews of YA titles. This is very helpful to me because as the buyer for children’s books, I read the picture books, the board books, a lot of the middle grade, and some of the YA, but I can’t read all of them.
Also, you know, I’m just like every other reader. I mean, a lot of the booksellers, there’s things that we like to read. For me, fantasy—I’ve never been a big fantasy reader, so I don’t feel really qualified to pick out fantasy books all the time. I mean, of course, we could pick out things that are just bestsellers and that’s easy, but what we like to do is create a variety of titles. And the best way to do that is to sort of bring in people who can read the books and evaluate them because they’re fans of that category. So that’s what TAB does as well. They’re really a fan of this category and they help advise us on the best books of the season.
Grace: Yeah, that’s really cool how TAB kind of gets youth engaged in what books will be selected for the bookstore. Okay, so the last question might be a bit of a hard one. But what is one moment that you are proud of at Hicklebee’s Bookstore?
Laura: There’s been many memorable moments, but I would say what I thought about when I read that question really was just sort of how proud I am to continue the work. There really isn’t any one specific moment, but I will say that I am proud of all of the booksellers at Hicklebee’s. They’re very dedicated and I have the benefit of working with booksellers who have been at Hicklebee’s for 10 years, 15 years. They bring a lot of institutional knowledge and great work.
And it really is a privilege to work with them. We get together for a staff meeting once a month. And I think at the start of the second year, they recognized—we recognized together—the start of the new business the second year. And I really appreciated that recognition. And I just felt it was a nice moment for us to celebrate the second year. A transition with a business is never easy, and we had a lot to be thankful for and to celebrate. So I think that was pretty memorable—getting through the first year and carrying on.
Grace: Yeah, that sounds really memorable for me even as an outsider. So that kind of concludes our interview today. Thank you so much for agreeing to the interview today!
Laura: Yeah, thank you for your interest, Grace! I think it’s great that you’re focused on community businesses. I really appreciate it. It was my pleasure to help out. Thank you.
Grace: Have a nice day!
Laura: You do the same, Grace. Take care.
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