Photo courtesy of Alabama Booksmith
The Alabama Booksmith owner Jake Reiss, right, poses with author Jay Busbee holding a signed copy of Busbee’s “Iron in the Blood: How the Alabama vs. Auburn Rivalry Shaped the Soul of the South.” Reiss, 90, has run the store for 35 years.
Jake Reiss was 54 years old, a custom tailor by trade, and had no particular plan to enter the book business. His son Frank was opening a store. Reiss decided to help. That was 36 years ago. Today, at 90, he still comes in seven days a week to the Alabama Booksmith — the small, singular shop tucked behind a highway in Homewood that The New Yorker and Garden & Gun have both recently stopped to notice.
Asked what he knew about bookselling when he walked through the door all those years ago, Reiss didn’t overthink it.
“I have no idea,” he said.
That candor is part of what makes the Alabama Booksmith hard to categorize. The store carries roughly a thousand titles at a time, every single one signed by its author, every one displayed cover-out like a painting in a gallery and every one sold at the same price you’d pay for an unsigned copy anywhere else. It is, by most accounts, a retail model that has no real equivalent anywhere in the country.
Photo courtesy of Alabama Booksmith
Every title in the store is author-signed and sold at the same price as unsigned copies elsewhere. Harper Lee, Condoleezza Rice and Kathryn Stockett are among the authors who have signed at the Homewood shop.
The signed-copy focus wasn’t born from philosophy; it was born from observation. When the store carried tens of thousands of titles, the signed books were the ones moving. Reiss noticed, adjusted and never looked back. The store relocated to Homewood in 1999 and underwent a complete custom renovation in 2012, right down to the curtains and floor mats, and it has been building its mailing list ever since. Today, roughly 5,000 customers from around the world receive the store’s email updates, and most of the business runs through that channel.
Harper Lee signed there. So did Condoleezza Rice and Kathryn Stockett. When asked what draws authors of that caliber to a small store in Alabama, Reiss reframed the question entirely.
“We’re under the impression these folks were not looking to get, but to give,” he said.
That spirit of giving runs through Reiss’s life outside the store, as well. He helped found Big Brothers/Big Sisters in Birmingham, served the Downtown Kiwanis Club and has advised UAB’s English department. On why community involvement has been such a constant, he didn’t get complicated about it: if every business — or every person — gave a little of themselves, he said, we’d have a different world.
Photo courtesy of Alabama Booksmith
Author Robert McCammon signs copies of “Seven Shades of Evil” at the Alabama Booksmith in Homewood, one of roughly 1,000 signed titles the store carries at any given time. The store’s mailing list now reaches approximately 5,000 customers worldwide.
The Alabama Booksmith has outlasted Amazon’s rise, a pandemic and the quiet disappearance of independent bookstores across the country. Asked for the honest account of how that happened, Reiss invokes Darwin. The store adapted to its customers, to its authors, to its own identity. The recent press attention from national outlets brought a surge of orders from across the country and around the world, but the foundation was already there: a loyal readership that had been built one signed book and one trusted recommendation at a time.
For Homewood Star readers who have driven past the store without stopping, Reiss has a pitch, characteristically direct. Four things, he said: great books, all hand signed, genius booksellers and the same retail price as unsigned copies.
What does it mean that a store started on a whim by a tailor in his fifties has become a place that now serves thousands of customers worldwide. Reiss didn’t reach for sentimentality.
“The most legal fun ever,” he said.
At 90, asked what’s still left to do for the Alabama Booksmith, Reiss kept it short: “Keep on keepin’ on.” Seven days a week, he still does.
The Alabama Booksmith is located at 2626 19th Place S., Homewood. For more information, call the Alabama Booksmith at 205-870-4242 or visit alabamabooksmith.com.
