The cat’s name is Page, and she is a little sensitive about her weight. That line appears in the store’s own description, and it tells you most of what you need to know about Book Buyers before you walk in.
Page was a kitten when the staff found her abandoned by the dumpster behind the shopping center. She let them feed her, decided they were good people and moved in, according to Love Meow, which profiled her when a photograph of her attitude went around the internet. She has been supervising the humans ever since.
It started in Plaza Midwood
Book Buyers opened in 1999 in the Midwood Corners shopping center in Plaza Midwood, and for more than two decades it was the used bookstore most Charlotte readers named first, with a neon sign reading Used Books that a visiting British book blogger called unmissable. The store is owned by Lee Rathers and her father, Richard Rathers.
The Rathers did not want to leave. But the rent doubled, and in December 2021 they held a moving sale and began the enormous job of relocating a used bookstore, according to a blog by UNC Charlotte professor Mark West, who has bought a good share of his collection of antique children’s books there. Lee Rathers wrote to him that the store had been priced out of Plaza Midwood along with numerous other businesses.
The new location is at Eastway Crossing, on the corner of Eastway Drive and Central Avenue, a mile or so east. The store had a soft opening in the spring of 2022 and a grand reopening that summer, and Lee Rathers described the move as an exciting new phase in a fast growing part of east Charlotte.
The people behind it
Lee Rathers is the face of the shop, and the one who posts trivia questions on Instagram every Friday, according to CLTtoday. Regulars describe the store as a second home and the owners by first name. A thread on a Charlotte subreddit asking for the city’s best bookstore drew more than a hundred votes for a single sentence: Book Buyers is the used bookstore.
The store specializes in history, art and architecture, classic literature and fiction, and carries fiction in other languages, a new releases section and a dollar section. A small eco friendly shop called The Greener Apple runs at the front, selling snacks and apparel. The cats, Page and Deena, are the other staff. Anyone allergic should know before they come.
What you actually find
A used bookstore lives on turnover, and Book Buyers buys as well as sells, which is where the name comes from. The stock is large enough that the organization matters, and regulars praise how easy it is to find a section in a store this size. Prices are low enough to take a chance on an author you have never read, which is the argument for a used bookstore in the first place.
There is a reading nook, background music and, in the professor’s telling, a corner where he found books from 1830. The store is open seven days, with Sunday afternoons the quiet time.
Page’s rise to internet fame came from a photograph a customer posted to Reddit, which Love Meow picked up under the headline that the store had a cat with some serious attitude. The captions on the store’s own photos of her include Keep your friends close and your enemies closer, and Supervising the humans’ work. She receives customers’ adoration, the site noted, from afar. Deena, the other cat, predates the move and was the one Professor West said hello to on his visits to the old Plaza Midwood store.
The Eastway Crossing shopping center that took the store in has become a cluster of independent businesses in its own right, and one Reddit commenter recommending Book Buyers noted the whole center was filled with them. The neighborhood around Eastway Drive and Central Avenue is one of the fastest changing in east Charlotte, and the store’s owners have described the move as a new phase in a growing area, which is the optimistic reading of being priced out of the last one.
Why it matters
Charlotte has fewer bookstores than a city its size should, a visitor from England noted in 2015, and it has fewer now than it did then. The ones that survive have survived rent. Book Buyers is the case study: a family business that lost its home of 22 years to a doubled lease and moved a mile east instead of closing, which is more than most of its Plaza Midwood neighbors managed.
The Plaza Midwood that priced it out is a busier, more expensive place than it was in 1999. Eastway Crossing is what Plaza Midwood used to be. The books are the same, the cats came along, and the sign still says Used Books.