When the staff page the back office at Park Road Books, they usually want the owner. Yola comes anyway. The small brown dog leaps to work, trots the length of the store with little announcing barks, finds the customers at the register and rolls over. Faces come up from books. Strangers laugh together. Charlotte Magazine named her a Charlottean of the Year in 2019, and her hours are now posted on the front door.
Behind her, laughing, is Sally Brewster, who has owned Charlotte’s oldest independent bookstore since 2003 and worked in it since 1999. The dog is the mascot. Brewster is the reason the store is still here.
It started as a franchise
The store opened in 1977 in Park Road Shopping Center as a Little Professor, one of a chain of franchised bookstores common at the time, Brewster told a publisher’s blog. Its longtime owner was a man named John, who built it into the city’s full-service independent bookstore and a stop for touring authors from David Sedaris to Anne Rice to Mo Willems.
Brewster joined in August 1999, and the store’s name changed to Park Road Books. In 2003 she bought it from John, who retired and went on to help create Julia’s Cafe & Books at the Habitat for Humanity ReStore, according to UNC Charlotte professor Mark West. Brewster became the store’s second owner in 26 years.
The hard years followed. The 2008 recession and the 2020 pandemic both threatened the store, and Brewster has credited the people of Charlotte with keeping it open through both, in a first-person chapter she contributed to James Patterson’s 2024 book about booksellers and librarians. She had no control over what he wrote, she told West. She said she meant it as a compliment.
The Patterson book placed Brewster among booksellers and librarians nationwide, and her chapter’s opening anecdote is about the day a Charlotte Magazine reporter called. Brewster assumed the story was about the store, she recounts, and learned the reporter mainly wanted to write about Yola, who had been nominated for Charlottean of the Year. The dog won. The magazine’s 2019 profile described customers who express displeasure when Yola is not working and call ahead to ask whether she can stay a little late.
The woman behind it
Brewster describes the store as more than a store: a small community, a place where people browse, discuss books with each other and get recommendations. And visit Yola, obviously. The dog came home from Gaston County’s animal shelter in 2009 as a five-month-old puppy and has been at work almost every day since. Brewster never did a DNA test on her breed mix, the magazine reported. Guessing is more fun.
The Patterson chapter closes with a story Brewster tells about a little girl who asked whether other animals were allowed, since dogs were. She had a tortoise named Shelly. Brewster said yes, expecting a stuffed animal, and the girl came back with a real tortoise. Shelly, according to Brewster, is now a regular customer.
The previous owner, John, built the store’s reputation as the place touring authors stopped: David Sedaris, Anne Rice, Jeff Kinney and Mo Willems have all signed books there, according to an account cited by Women AdvaNCe. After he sold to Brewster and retired he volunteered to help create Julia’s Cafe & Books, the bookstore inside the Habitat for Humanity ReStore on North Wendover Road, and collected rare and signed books until his death.
What you actually find
The store is slim and dense, with books on nearly every surface and, as one visitor put it, a glorious central square that invites reading. It carries new titles across every genre, a large children’s section with comfortable chairs, and a run of bookish gifts: cards, journals, totes, puzzles. Author signings are constant, book clubs meet, and the staff’s recommendations are the service that keeps the store voted Charlotte’s best bookstore year after year.
The location does the rest. Park Road Shopping Center is one of the oldest in the city, with restaurants and shops on every side, and the bookstore has been its anchor for nearly fifty years. The store is dog friendly, so a well-behaved visitor is welcome to meet Yola on her terms.
The store’s hours run into the evening on weekdays, which matters for a bookstore that hosts as many author events as this one does, and it added online ordering and curbside pickup during the pandemic that Brewster credits with keeping it open. Independent Bookstore Day each April brings signings and a crowd, and in 2024 Brewster’s chapter in James Patterson’s book brought national readers who had never heard of Park Road Shopping Center to a store that has been in it since Jimmy Carter’s first year.
Why it matters
Independent bookstores in Charlotte have closed, moved and been priced out through the decades Park Road Books has stayed put. It survived the chains, then the recession, then the pandemic, and the reason it gives is the city. The reason the city gives is Sally Brewster, and a dog who thinks every page is for her.
The store is called a cornerstone and an icon by people who write about bookstores for a living. Inside, it is a woman who bought the place she worked at, a shelter dog with posted hours and a tortoise with a loyalty card. That is a bookstore.