Last April, one of Seattle’s most respected booksellers announced that he and his partner, the former bookstore marketing manager that he’d recently moved to St. Louis to be with, would be opening a shop here. James Crossley and Amanda Clark called their shop Leviathan Bookstore, after the fictional creature built from bones found by a Missouri farmer, and anticipated an opening later that year.
They missed that date—but not by much. Clark and Crossley yesterday launched a Kickstarter preparing for a soft opening later this month, with March 1 as the grand opening. Last week, they ferried Leviathan’s first collection of books into its new storefront: The former home of Zee Bee Market’s city outpost, at 3211 South Grand in Tower Grove South.
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The books came from just a few blocks north. Since April, Leviathan had been popping up at Dunaway Books, the used bookstore on South Grand. Clark, who is a public historian for the Missouri Historical Society and founder of the popular Renegade STL Tours, put out a call on Instagram for volunteers to help form a train of dollies to get the books down the street. “People showed up!” she reports. “People I didn’t even know. They even brought our big bookcase.”
Dunaway’s owners, Crossley adds, could not have been more supportive during what proved to be an eight-month pop-up—as well as towards Leviathan’s plans to take up more permanent residence right down the street. “They recognized right away that they would benefit each other,” says Crossley of the two stores. “Another store means more reason for book lovers to come to the street.” The couple hopes the collaboration with Dunaway will be just the first of many, certain that having more bookstores means increasingly the audience and building community, not competition.
When Crossley and Clark met in 2018 at the publishing trade show BookExpo, he’d gone from working at Amazon during its earliest days to dedicating his professional life to the kind of indie booksellers the tech giant once aspired to put out of business. Not long after meeting Clark, he landed a dream gig as the founding manager of Seattle’s Madison Books, which Publishers Weekly in 2022 listed as a finalist for the best bookstores in America. The Seattle Times would describe Crossley as a “legendary” bookseller “known for his exquisite taste.”
But as the pair got to know each other, Crossley also got to know St. Louis—and not only fell in love with Clark, but with her adopted city as well. (Clark is originally from Tennessee.) Clark says Crossley told her that St. Louis reminded him of Seattle 20 years ago.
“It’s so interesting,” he says of St. Louis. “In some ways, it feels like a more real place than Seattle today. It also feels like a place that could really use another bookstore.”
Indeed, even though St. Louis has more indie bookstores than other similarly sized cities, Crossley compares its roster to the two dozen shops in Seattle and is convinced there’s plenty of room for more. He notes that the city proper has just one full service store focused on new books, the venerable Left Bank Books, which has grown to be a juggernaut since its founding in 1969. Leviathan, with its compact 900 square feet, will aim for a more curated feel.
“The personalized service will set us apart,” says Clark. (A co-founder of the shop, she remains committed to her work at the Missouri Historical Society; Crossley will manage the store day to day.) “If people are coming in and saying, ‘I don’t know what book I want,’ here’s someone who’s gotten to know you, and he knows what book you want.”
Says Crossley, “The way I’ve run bookstores, I did not see that exactly here.”
Along with the shop’s one-on-one service, the couple hopes to offer a serious collection—and that’s where the Kickstarter comes in. They’re offering various perks to donors of different levels, including the option to have your personal recommendation on display, the way some shops share staff picks. If they can meet their goal, they’ll start with 4,500 tomes on site, a big upgrade from the 1,500 or so they carted over from Dunaway.
They’re counting on the community—the community that Clark has built in her two decades here, and the one that’s helped Crossley find his place since moving here one year ago. Clark notes that, in an effort to be strategic, she originally tried to steer Crossley towards a more well-heeled part of town. “I was like, ‘You’ve got to go to Ladue,’” she recalls. “But South Grand and the city just felt right.”
Says Crossley, “There’s nothing wrong with the county. But I didn’t come here to do the county. I came here to do St. Louis.”
