Owning a bookstore has been a childhood dream. But the dream always felt far away.

I grew up with a literature professor for a mom, a fine arts artist for a dad and went to a Waldorf literature based school in Brazil.

While on summer vacation with my two kids and expecting my third, we visited a local independent bookstore in the town we were visiting. To celebrate the occasion I told my daughters (5 and 3 at the time) to go and “pick any book you want!”. We had plenty of great children’s books at home and I’d assumed they would follow suit. However, this bookstore had a small, almost hidden, classics section - and a large section of “fluff” books. My five year old returned to me very excited with a “Unicorns Poop” book. I was not going to spend money on that, and that resulted in quite a few tears. My three year old was distracted with sound making books based on common tv characters. I was so disheartened. We continued with our roadtrip and made a point to stop in as many local bookshops as we could. And time after time I kept encountering the same issue. Children’s book sections were filled with either completely pointless books, political narrations, or worse - books with what seemed like AI generated images and stories. Can’t someone open a bookshop where classics are at the forefront of the books? Where they care about good story telling, compelling characters, and beautiful illustrations? A seed was planted.

As a family we had decided to homeschool our children, however I felt clueless once my daughter was nearing kindergarten age. My husband and I attended schools our whole life. I began reading several books on home education and became enamored with Charlotte Mason and a classical education. I began researching curriculums and resources but couldn’t find anything near our town of Bozeman. I wanted to browse several types of curricula in person, see what they look like inside, flip through the pages, try it out with my kiddo. But everything I could find was online only. I didn’t want to spend hundreds of dollars on textbooks and curriculums without really knowing what I was getting into. Aha. Couldn’t someone open a bookstore that houses all the great classics?

Well, I decided to give it a go. A perfect little 400sq ft retail space opened up near us and the rest is history. Royal Road is such a passion of mine, I want our future generations to have access to fantastic literature from the moment they can hold on to a book. Starting and operating this bookstore has been more exhilarating and more difficult than I could’ve predicted, but the road is so rewarding. Thank you for being here with us!