A small bookstore, a long love letter to Pulaski County.

In the spring of 2009, Margaret Whitaker signed the lease on an empty bait-and-tackle shop at 308 South Highway 27 — a long, narrow room with high tin ceilings, brick walls scarred by a century of hardware nails, and a back window that looked out toward the lake.

She and her husband David spent the summer building shelves from reclaimed barn wood, hauling in a wood stove, and arguing about whether to call it a bookstore or a bookshop. Bookshop won. They opened in October with 2,400 titles, a coffee pot from the kitchen, and a sign that read "Come in. Stay a while."

Fifteen years later, the wood stove is still there. So is the sign. We've added a second room, a proper espresso machine, four book clubs, and a porch out back that catches the afternoon light off the water. David still builds the shelves. Margaret still reads everything before it goes on them.

We believe that a bookstore is a community's library of possibility — the place where a teenager finds her first Toni Morrison, where a retired farmer discovers Wendell Berry wrote about his own hollow, where neighbors who've never spoken end up in a corner debating James Baldwin until close.

We're proud to be a member of the American Booksellers Association, an Indies First store, and one of only a handful of independent bookshops between Lexington and Nashville. We're prouder still to be Burnside's.

— Margaret & David Whitaker, owners