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The Reading Tree Bookshop, with a goal of being "a home for readers, dreamers, and community seekers of all ages," will open later this year in Charlotte, N.C. The store is owned by Julie Isgrigg, a veteran of the book industry, with David and Michelle Ebersman, and they've launched a $20,000 Indiegogo campaign "to help us build the shelves, order the inventory, braid the story rug, and pay our staff."
The bookstore will be located at 7314 Waverly Walk Ave., Suite E4, in the Waverly shopping center in South Charlotte. "Until about two years ago, there had only been one full-service indie bookstore selling new books in Charlotte (Park Road Books)," Isgrigg noted. "We'll just be the third indie selling only new books. It's remarkable, given that we're a city of about a million people and a sprawling geographic area."
Current plans call for a soft opening of the Reading Tree Bookshop in December, with a grand opening in January. The 2,200-square-foot general-interest bookstore will feature new books for all ages as well as some small arts and crafts kits (especially embroidery kits) "because they align with my own interests," she said.
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| Julie Isgrigg | |
Isgrigg worked in the book trade for more than 25 years, starting at the Borders corporate offices in Ann Arbor, Mich., then moving to Baker & Taylor in Charlotte, and finally, for the past seven years, as a regional sales rep for Hachette. She received NAIBA's Kristin Keith Sales Rep of the Year award this summer, and left Hachette in September.
"I'm ready to take everything I've learned in my career and try to create something good and bookish and meaningful right in the neighborhood where I live, after focusing on readers and bookstores in other areas of the country," Isgrigg said.
The transition from sales rep to bookstore owner was sparked in January 2025, according to Isgrigg, who recalled: "I was finishing up a sales call with Gayle [Weiswasser] and Amy [Joyce], the owners of Wonderland Books in Bethesda, Md. They hadn't been open very long at that point, and I had been working with them since the development of their opening inventory. I mentioned out loud my own dream to open a bookstore. Gayle paused and gave me a 'Really? Because I was talking to a friend from college who recently moved to Charlotte. He said he was thinking about opening a bookstore.'
"She introduced the two of us. That's when David Ebersman and I discovered a shared vision and mission, and found that our skills and experiences made the ideal alchemy for a bookstore partnership. In the spring of this year, we decided to take our ideas and make them a reality." Michelle Ebersman was a high school teacher and David Ebersman worked in technology and healthcare.
Isgrigg noted that she will be the face of the Reading Tree Bookstore, responsible for branding, events, and operations. David Ebersman "is more behind-the-scenes. His motivation for wanting to open the store is in memory of his son, who was killed in an accident. His son was on the autism spectrum, and David thought that a bookstore is the kind of place where his son could have worked and thrived. And so, in addition to our other reasons for opening the store, we're using the store as that way to honor the memory of Sam." She added: "We also intend to hire individuals who live with autism as part of our staff."