Inside a Utah Shop That Sells Books, Skateboards, Coffee and Sunscreen

In a small alpine town in Utah’s Wasatch Mountains, a converted service station has opened as something stranger than a bookstore and livelier than a skate shop. One former waiting room now pours coffee; one garage bay is stacked with skateboards and oversized shorts; another holds books, art supplies and even Korean-formulated sunscreens. The shop’s owner describes the place as neatly chosen rather than merely eclectic, even if visitors have already started calling it maximalist.

The store’s first days, documented in a June 2026 piece for The Paris Review and photographed by Claire Carusillo, suggest a business built as much on personality as inventory. Avery, the only employee besides Galen and the narrator, handles coffee from the repurposed waiting room bar. Sarah, visiting from New York to help with the grand opening, takes over the drinks menu and receipt printer. The narrator notes that Sarah has been doing the kinds of tasks the shop owner does not want to do for 15 years, a sign that this is a friendship as well as a startup.

The early sales also point to the shop’s literary character. The first title sold is a used copy of Benjamin Franklin’s Fart Proudly: Writings of Benjamin Franklin You Never Read in School, purchased by a high school English teacher on a daytime date. Next goes Mary Austin’s The Land of Little Rain to a studious college student. Then comes Stephanie LaCava’s I Fear My Pain Interests You, bought by a girl who appears to be about thirteen and who pays with her own money despite being accompanied by her parents. The narrator’s reaction reveals the shop’s balancing act: it is a place that welcomes young readers, but also one where questions about age, taste and access still hang in the air.

A shop with a split identity

What makes the business notable is not only that it mixes retail categories, but that it does so in a mountain town already charged with its own social contrasts. The narrator and Galen moved from New York and, by their account, their presence alone once made them something of a local scandal: a thirty-four-year-old unmarried woman living with a forty-year-old skateboarder in a place where that was enough to feel conspicuous. That changed when a nearby farm store, owned by a former ballerina with millions of Instagram followers, began drawing Sprinter vans full of women in prairie dresses into town on Fridays and Saturdays.

The narrator initially resented the influx, especially the effect on parking near the post office, but the tone softens as the account goes on. The ballerina’s following has brought a new kind of attention to the area, and the writer suggests that even a misstep or two in raw milk processing has not diminished the appeal of the farm-store phenomenon. In that context, the bookstore-skate shop becomes part of a larger story about how niche retail can shape local identity and tourist traffic.

Music is part of the shop’s atmosphere too. Galen has become fixated on Doug Supernaw’s song “Reno,” and the pair dig into its backstory, including a reported 1993 radio ban by Reno’s mayor. The song’s fate becomes a local joke and a kind of shorthand for how places get imagined, moralized and turned into symbols. Another favorite, “Brigham Young,” recorded by folk singer Rosalie Sorrels, adds to the sense that the shop’s soundtrack is assembled from regional history, campfire storytelling and old western oddity.

That blend of commerce and commentary is what gives the place its literary interest. The narrator does not simply stock books; she frames them in relation to readers, tourists, skaters and the social theater around them. Even the day’s best-performing non-coffee item is unexpected: washi tape printed with bears playing the drums outsells nearly everything except iced lattes. The result is a retail space that seems to understand books not as hushed artifacts, but as objects that can sit comfortably beside a skateboard, a cappuccino or a pack of decorative tape.

The second half of the shop’s opening week only heightens that feeling. On June 20, a group of skaters arrives in a diesel truck with a dog in an arm cast named Laika, turning the shop into a noisy scene of merchandise, slang and day-tripping appetite. They later head off for sandwiches and a nearby creek, while the narrator watches a fresh Instagram video of them swimming, smoking and being baptized in a riverbed pool that a customer had built. Then comes Max with a baby raccoon rescued during a skate emergency, which briefly pushes the business toward the brink of an unauthorized petting zoo.

By the end of that day, the narrator has gone from trying to impose order to surrendering to the sight of the animal eating a quarter of a banana. That shift is telling. The shop’s appeal lies not in discipline, but in the way it absorbs the odd, the local and the literary into one messy experience. For readers, booksellers and anyone interested in how independent retail survives now, the storefront offers a vivid example of a business that is also a scene—and of how, in the right hands, a place to buy a novel can become a place where a town tells on itself.