Whose Books in Oak Cliff is marking its third anniversary Saturday, November 9, with Shelf Shuffle, a communal celebration and book drive benefiting Activating Reading Communities Organization (ARCO), the nonprofit overseen by Whose Books founder Claudia Vega. ARCO will also be celebrating by offering discounts for Whose Books customers, prizes, and vendors for attendees to enjoy.
“Whose Books [is] a social impact, independent bookstore that handles…the retail piece of the book selling, right? And then our nonprofit arm is ARCO, which is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, that handles all of the programming, all of the community outreach, [and] all of our gifting of books into the community,” says Vega, explaining the relationship between the two organizations.
Vega sees the two-pronged approach of engaging with the community through both Whose Books and ARCO as critical to fulfilling the mission statement she and her husband, John, set for themselves when they originally opened their store in a small space in Tyler Station. They had spent 20-plus years working as Dallas educators. “I think my husband and I had always had this…dream of opening up a bookstore for our community,” she says. “We both grew up here in Oak Cliff, and reading was a really big part of both of our lives as children.”
They were aware, though, that not everyone had the same access to books that they did growing up. Working in education frequently reminded them of this fact. “It was just very inconsistent in Oak Cliff for a long time with what kind of book access and book ownership access there was,” she says.
The Vegas identified the root cause of the reading challenges facing their community. They built their store to promote a culture of reading for residents. They put together a plan to use Whose Books to tackle these issues of access head-on. Their initial idea was met with some skepticism, though. “We got a lot of…side glances and weird comments and people who didn’t want to lease to us,” Claudia Vega recalls. They were told that unless they sold alcohol, the store would not be successful. The skeptics told them that Oak Cliff already had The Wild Detectives, so another bookshop would be redundant.
“Wild Detectives is a great bookstore,” says Vega. “We love it. But what we were trying to create was something different, right? Something that was more family-centered and community-facing and that centered primarily on reading culture and books, not coffee and alcohol. And it wasn’t easy, but we were fortunate enough that we found an incubator space over at Tyler Station to…launch things and test it out.”
In 2021, Whose Books opened in Tyler Station in the central Oak Cliff neighborhood of Elmwood. The community response, Vega recalls, was overwhelmingly positive. It outgrew the space, and in 2023 they relocated the shop to its current location in Bishop Arts. After the move, Vega launched ARCO to execute on Whose Books’ mission in new ways.
“One of the things that we realized really, really quickly was that we were going to need to do more than just have the bookstore,” says the founder. “We were going to need to have a very focused, mission-driven effort in the form of a nonprofit.”
Vega says about half of the people they interacted with were already readers who were excited to support Whose Books, but they also had a number of patrons who she recalls “were curious and who [were] maybe new to reading, that [had] never been in a bookstore before and didn’t really know how to engage with it…but wanted to.”
Since its founding a year ago, the nonprofit arm, ARCO, has been busy. “We’ve had over 100 free community-facing, literary-focused events this year,” says Vega, who serves as the nonprofit’s executive director. “That [includes] story time, author events, book clubs, community, and conversations, but all centered somehow on literature or a book.”
ARCO has donated over 2,000 books through many of its programs. “We’ve made this huge kind of impact in getting people talking about and engaging with books in our community that previously hadn’t, and it really has been beautiful.”
Shelf Shuffle represents the next evolutionary step for Whose Books and ARCO.
“We’re encouraging people to bring us donated books that are gently used,” says Vega. “We are asking for books that are from 2019 on, with an emphasis on BIPOC stories and voices. That’s a big part of what ARCO does, is to really uplift inclusion and representation in literature, knowing that if people see themselves in the literature, they’re more likely to engage with it.”
The book drive will also help ARCO expand its scope of influence. “We have people in other parts of the community, other ZIP codes that we engage with and say, you know, we really want some book access there. Well, then these donated books will give us an opportunity to help and go put books in these locations.”
ARCO employs “pay what you can” format for the used books, and any proceeds help cover the costs of free storytime events and book giveaways. The event will also feature a live jazz band, as well as a handful of “coffee and populist vendors” according to Vega, who says the ultimate objective is “creating a community space for people to come together and to engage with each other in a way that’s festive, but also helps to uplift literature.”
The Saturday, November 9, anniversary celebration at Whose Books is scheduled from 11 AM to 2 PM. Anyone interested in attending can RSVP for free here. 512 W. Davis St.
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