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.
Read the rest of article in part 2!
The Megaphone 