A Novel Idea: The Bookstore a Neighborhood Built Together

There’s something special about a neighborhood bookstore. You can wander in looking for one particular book and leave with three others, a recommendation you didn’t know you needed, or a conversation that stays with you long after you’ve left.

At A Novel Idea, in Philadelphia, books are only part of the story. The shop is also a gathering place, a home for local creativity, and a reminder of what can happen when people invest in the place where they live.

When I sat down with owners Christina Rosso-Schneider and Alex Schneider, I wanted to hear how the bookstore came to be. What emerged was a story about creative partnership, a little bit of improvisation, and a community that has repeatedly shown up for the people who built something for it.

A bookstore begins with a conversation

In 2017, Christina and Alex were living in the neighborhood, planning a wedding, and juggling multiple jobs. They were overworked and underappreciated, and finding even half an hour to sit down together for a meal could be a challenge.

One evening, while walking around the neighborhood and looking at empty storefronts, Christina said out loud, that one of the spaces would make a great bookstore. They had always loved books and entertained the idea of owning a bookstore, though neither imagined it would become a reality.

Alex’s response was simple: Why don’t we open a bookstore?

The idea stuck. Christina brought a background in writing, teaching, and organizing community events. Alex brought experience in graphic design, branding, and merchandising, along with years of customer service experience between them. They began researching what it would take to open a shop, visiting bookstores around Philadelphia and up and down the East Coast, and figuring out everything from startup costs to which books to stock.

Their neighborhood hadn’t had a bookstore for somewhere between 20 and 30 years. They saw an opportunity to bring one back.

When they married in October 2018, they asked wedding guests to contribute used books or money toward the new business instead of traditional wedding gifts. Six weeks later, on December 1, A Novel Idea opened its doors.

A little family history in the walls

The storefront they eventually secured wasn’t even available when they first started imagining the business. The space had been leased for another shop that never opened, and the circumstances eventually gave Christina and Alex an opportunity to make it their own.

During renovations, Alex discovered something unexpected in the basement: electrical wiring installed by his grandfather’s company.

It was a small but meaningful connection between the building’s past and the people who were about to give it a new life. A bookstore is full of stories, of course, but sometimes the story of the place itself is just as interesting as the ones on its shelves.

Opening day, with a little improvisation

The opening of A Novel Idea was less a perfectly choreographed launch than an exercise in figuring things out as they went.

The final renovations happened over Thanksgiving weekend, with family pitching in to paint, hang wallpaper, and finish the bookshelves. Alex even built the checkout counter from materials found in the basement. The first major shipment of books arrived only hours before opening, and the store was still without internet or phone service.

The store opened anyway.

Customers arrived in such numbers that the line seemed to never end. Christina and Alex improvised their way through purchases, using cash, Venmo, pen and paper, and plenty of patience. Family members and friends helped with bags, questions, and book recommendations. The neighborhood was ready for a bookstore, and everyone did what they could to keep things moving. The shop was supposed to close at seven, but by the time they finally closed around nine, they’d been open for hours beyond their planned closing time.

There’s a particular kind of courage in opening a business before you feel completely ready. You make the best decisions you can with what you have, respond to what’s happening in front of you, and keep going. It’s a little like improvisation: you can prepare, but eventually you have to step into the scene and see what happens.

A bookstore that reflects the people who built it

A Novel Idea has a personality all its own. The store is known for its spooky sensibility, with a dedicated horror section and plenty of room for folklore, witchcraft, and the occult. Christina is a practicing pagan witch as well as a writer, and their interests are part of what makes the shop feel distinctive.

Christina has published two books: She’s a Beast, a collection of feminist fairy tales, in 2020, and Creole Conjure, an interconnected collection of short stories drawing on fairy tales, folklore, and mythology, in 2021. Their debut novel, The Last Sheaf, is scheduled for publication in October 2027.

But A Novel Idea isn’t defined by one genre or interest. The shop also champions Philadelphia’s creative community, with work by local artists and makers, a section devoted to books about Philadelphia, and a steady calendar of events.

Since the earliest days of the store, Christina and Alex have used the space to bring people together. Their events have included author readings, book clubs, story times, workshops, tarot and astrology, murder mysteries, music, and even weddings. At the time of our conversation, they were hosting around four or five events a week.

The bookstore isn’t simply a place where people come to buy something. It’s a place where they can discover something, learn something, meet someone, or find people who share an interest they might not have anywhere else to explore.

The community that showed up

Building a small business is one thing. Keeping it alive through a pandemic, financial uncertainty, and the everyday realities of running a storefront is another.

When COVID forced businesses to close, A Novel Idea had no online store. The shop had thousands of dollars’ worth of inventory and no established way to sell it remotely. Christina and Alex began photographing books and posting them online, keeping track of inventory in a spreadsheet. They also worked through the painstaking process of adding thousands of titles to Bookshop.org, entering books one ISBN at a time.

It was an enormous amount of work, but it helped them keep going.

Then, in 2023, the business faced another serious financial crisis. After investing so much of their own money into the shop, Christina and Alex were running out of options. They launched a GoFundMe with a $10,000 goal, a figure that already felt daunting.

The community raised more than $30,000 in a matter of days.

That response changed what was possible for the bookstore. It also reinforced something Christina and Alex had been learning all along: people cared deeply about the shop, but they sometimes needed a reminder of what it takes to keep an independent bookstore open.

Book margins are slim. There’s rent, payroll, inventory, and the many expenses customers never see. Buying a book when you can, attending an event, making a small donation, or telling a friend about the shop can all make a difference.

In response, Christina and Alex became more transparent about the realities of running the business and introduced a membership program that has grown to more than 130 members.

The support isn’t limited to money. When the store’s basement flooded over Labor Day weekend, people reached out with fans, food, equipment, and offers to help pump out the water. In another example of that generosity, a neighbor spent months helping rebuild the bookstore’s website. Customers, fellow business owners, friends, and family have all stepped in at different times when things went wrong.

The relationship between a local business and its community isn’t one-directional. The bookstore gives people a place to gather, discover, and connect. In return, the people who value that space help sustain it.

Working together, and learning how to listen

Christina and Alex are married, business partners, and collaborators in nearly every part of their lives. They met on Tinder, have been together for 11 years, and celebrated another wedding anniversary shortly before our conversation.

Working together has meant learning how differently they approach problems.

Alex is a visual thinker, shaped by years of graphic design and theater work. They often need to picture a solution before talking it through. Christina tends to work things out by talking. They might be heading toward the same destination but starting from very different places.

As they’ve learned over the years, being on the same page doesn’t necessarily mean being on the same part of the page.

Running a bookstore together has been a pressure cooker for communication. There are long days, high stakes, and very little separation between work and home. During the pandemic, they were living just a few blocks from the shop, which meant that even when they left work, work was never far away.

They’ve had to learn how to recognize what the other person needs, clarify what they mean, and find ways to navigate stressful moments together. They describe that process as something that has strengthened their relationship, even when it has been difficult.

Their partnership also makes the business feel personal. Customers know the people behind the counter, and Christina and Alex know many of the people who walk through the door. That closeness is part of the shop’s appeal, though it can also make it hard to step away. Some customers have favorite people to ask for recommendations, and the owners have to remind themselves that they can’t be there every hour of every day.

There’s a vulnerability in building a business that carries so much of yourself. It means the good days feel especially good, but the difficult days can be difficult in full view of everyone. As Christina and Alex pointed out, there isn’t always a back room to retreat to when real life happens.

And yet, that personal connection is also at the heart of what they’ve built.

More than a place to buy books

When I photograph the people behind local businesses, I’m interested in what you can’t learn from a storefront or a website alone. What made someone take the leap? What parts of their lives have shaped the place they’ve created? What happens when the work becomes more complicated than they imagined?

With Christina and Alex, I kept coming back to the way a bookstore can become a shared project between people who live in a neighborhood. Their story includes creative ambition, family history, a marriage that has evolved alongside a business, and a community that has repeatedly helped them weather difficult times.

A Novel Idea is a place built around books, but its deeper story is about connection. It’s about making room for people to find one another, and about the ways a neighborhood can become more than a collection of streets and storefronts.

The next time you visit a local business you love, consider the people behind the counter and the story that brought them there. Sometimes the most interesting part of a place isn’t what’s on its shelves. It’s the people, relationships, and unexpected turns that made it possible.

A Novel Idea is a reminder of how much a neighborhood can gain when people have a place to come together.

Visit A Novel Idea

A Novel Idea Bookstore

1726 E. Passyunk Avenue Philadelphia, PA 19148

Explore their books, upcoming events, and more at anovelideaphilly.com.