(Original post date: January 11, 2010)

We were excited this past Saturday night to attend the grand opening of Chapel Hill’s new independent bookstore, Flyleaf Books, and we’re even more excited that Flyleaf will host our opening event to discuss When the Parkway Came on Friday, January 22nd at 7:00 p.m. We hope you will all join us, along with your children! We’ll read from the book and talk a bit about how it came to be.

Located at the bottom of the hill near Foster’s on Martin Luther King/Airport Rd., Flyleaf has a capacious, attractive space with an especially good special-events room (formerly the yoga space when this was a fitness center). There was a huge crowd there Saturday, evidence of Chapel Hill’s pent-up desire for an independent bookstore with parking! (The Bull’s Head on the UNC campus is great and has a much larger inventory at present, but it’s almost impossible to get to if you’re not already on campus.)

One fun tidbit that we learned while there is that one of the store’s owners, Sarah Carr, has her M.A. from North Carolina State University’s Public History program, one of the oldest and best public history programs in the state. I took an “Introduction to Public History” graduate course there in 2002 with longtime program director John David Smith (now at UNC-Charlotte). That course was tremendously helpful in my development as a public historian. Archives and other historical sites all over North Carolina are ably staffed by graduates of this program, and I’m delighted to find that a public historian is also behind Flyleaf Books.

Please join us there on January 22nd at 7.