"Like all good tales, the story behind Wild Geese Bookshop is as wonderful as the ones you'll find inside on the shelves," CBS4 News noted in a profile of the Franklin, Ind., bookstore headlined "A story of community: How one woman's dream transformed into Franklin's favorite bookshop."
Owner Tiffany Phillips moved with her family to the area in 2015 when her husband accepted a position in the English Department at Franklin College. After renting a quaint property located downtown that was intended it to be an office for her law work, she realized there was also an opportunity to follow her other passion by opening a much-needed independent bookstore within the space she was going to use for her day job.
"Honestly, when I started it was just going to be for my law work. I just thought, 'I need to get out of the house and meet some people,' " said Phillips. "And when I looked at the space, it was zoned in such a way that I knew we could do commercial space in the front."
Phillips opened Wild Geese Bookshop in 2016. "It was just something that I always kind of had in my heart,” she said. "Franklin had a need [for an independent bookstore] and I needed Franklin too in a lot of ways." Now the bookshop is her full-time job, with the former law office space having been transformed into a children's room.
"I don't know that Wild Geese Bookshop--in its current form--would have been successful in a lot of other communities," she said. "But this is the kind of place that values handshakes, eye contact, slowing down, taking time with one another.... We're in a time when people are separated a lot on their screens and there are a lot of teams people get divided out into. But in the bookstore, people are interacting. They're meeting each other. They're coming to book club and they're connecting which is what I think we really need most in community now."