“My friend Paco and I used to go there just to hang out, and by having conversations with the people there, with the owners, that’s how they proposed we do a movie series, and all those things led to having the bookstore.”
He notes the multi-purpose areas of our neighborhood, and Bishop Arts in particular, gave a similar feel to what you can find in Europe, with people living in the same area as where they work or hang out.
“They usually behave differently with their environment, and those are things that are sometimes hard to pin down, but you can feel them,” García del Moral says, “and that sort of feeling is what we capture in Oak Cliff, and that’s why we decided to open up the bookstore in that area.”
There’s also been recent growth in our indie scene. Whose Books opened in 2021 originally at Tyler Station with the launch of their nonprofit arm, Activating Reading Communities Organization (ARCO), a year later to help remove barriers to book access. Then the second (and now only) Blush opened in 2024.
The Wild Detectives is now two bars and two venues, with the “Stories” location at the original Eighth Street address hosting fiction, poetry and literature in Spanish and the “Ideas” location, formerly Sketches of Spain, which opened in September to focus on history, philosophy, science, memoir, culture and the arts.
THE BOOK BOOMS
Booktok. Bookstagram. Book influencers are often taking over social media feeds.
That is part of what inspired Jaclyn Wooten, owner of Blush, to get back into reading, ultimately leading to her career change. When she discovered the earlier days of the bookish social media space, she “started devouring” books with her new author discoveries and increased interest in the romance genre.
“I have always loved reading, but I’ll say that like a lot of people, there’s kind of that story about rediscovering your love of reading and not just reading, but reading fiction and a lot of it during the pandemic, during 2020,” she says. “It’s the era of hobbies at home and just having so much more time than I had previously, and I think a lot of people will always feel like they don’t have time to read. And this was really a time where that excuse just didn’t exist.”