When beloved West End bookshop Bent Books announced it would close after 30 years, the Boundary Street community refused to let it happen. In a remarkable show of collective action, 850 Brisbane residents pooled their money to form River City Books Cooperative — Queensland's first community-owned independent bookstore, which opened its doors in the same shopfront last month.
Each member purchased a $100 share in the cooperative, raising $85,000 in seed capital. Combined with a $50,000 grant from the Queensland Government's Small Business Recovery Fund and a successful Pozible crowdfunding campaign, the co-op had enough to renovate the space, stock the shelves, and hire three part-time staff.
"West End without an independent bookshop? That's not West End," says co-op board chair Priya Mehta, a librarian at the State Library of Queensland who helped organize the buyout. "This neighborhood runs on ideas, conversation, and community. A bookshop is infrastructure for all three."
The store stocks a carefully curated selection of fiction, nonfiction, children's books, and a dedicated First Nations literature section developed in partnership with the blackandwrite! project at the State Library. Co-op members receive a 10 percent discount and vote on major decisions, from which author events to host to how late the shop stays open.
The space also includes a small café corner serving coffee from local roaster Fonzie Abbott and a community notice board that has quickly become the de facto information hub for Boundary Street. Monthly book clubs — including a popular one focused on Australian women writers — regularly fill the shop's 30-seat event space.
"We're not just selling books," says manager Tomoko Sato, who previously ran a bookshop in Melbourne. "We're holding space for the kind of slow, thoughtful community life that's getting harder to find." Early sales have exceeded projections by 40 percent.