Ginkgo Bookshop is trying to do more than sell books. Situated on The Corner, a place increasingly shaped by restaurants, chains, and high-cost hangouts, the student-run store aims to remain a place where reading is visible, social, and open to people beyond the University.
Ginkgo Bookshop opened in January 2026, replacing the former Heartwood Books space on Elliewood Avenue, under the leadership of UVA undergraduates Molly Canipe and Max Fleisher. They led the initiative to preserve the nearly 50-year-old used bookstore after owner Paul Collinge, founder of the Virginia Festival of the Book, retired.
For Molly Canipe, the shop’s ethos begins with a simple conviction: “Physical space is reflective of community values.” She argues that the Corner’s changing storefronts reveal what the area believes is worth making room for. Over the past decade, she said, the Corner has drifted away from tangible goods and toward food and other businesses with a financial barrier to entry. She also pointed to UVA’s “fraught relationship” with the city, from housing and labor issues to the broader tendency for students to treat the University area as if it “exists only for them.” In Max and Molly’s view, Ginkgo Bookshop is a means to bridge the gap between undergraduates and Charlottesville locals.
One way they aim to accomplish this lofty goal is by hosting free events, including a recent jazz night that drew in graduate students and even a few professors. Molly hopes that “as a community space we continue to bridge that gap because both communities have a lot to offer each other.”
She recounts that Heartwood Books, the store Ginkgo replaced, had long served the Charlottesville community. By the time Collinge handed it off, however, it had become less visible to undergraduates and more closely associated with faculty, graduate students, and longtime local regulars: “It had a big hold in the professor community; particularly, professors that did their Ph.D. here tend to have a really strong relationship with the bookstore because it has been here 50 years, so it’s kind of grown up with them.” Many students, Molly said, could walk past without even realizing it was there.
In her view, the issue was less a decline in reading than a mismatch between the store’s stock and the undergraduate public. Ginkgo is meant to rebalance that, making the bookstore more approachable and the books more recognizable to a wider range of readers.
That work of updating the bookstore’s stock to appeal to a wider audience requires a selection process, according to Max. The responsibility of that kind of filtering, he argued, is “not just because we can.” Instead, he sees it as analogous to the selection that already happens in universities, where professors decide what to assign and institutions decide what to privilege. A bookstore, in his view, should exercise similar discernment as an “arbiter of information,” and he plans to be transparent about that stance with customers.
The result is a shop that reflects those who curate it. Molly believes the store becomes “a physical manifestation” of the people running it, from the religious titles she shelves outward to the eclectic mix Max keeps near the front. A John Green novel sits beside a book titled “Cooking with Marijuana” — “it’s all an intentional choice,” Max said. For Molly, that curation supports their broader aim: “We want people to self-identify as readers more because I think once you give yourself the grace of that title, you do it more often.”
The legacy of Ginkgo Bookshop, in their vision, is cyclical. Max hopes to keep bringing in younger students so each new class leaves a mark on the store’s character. The inventory, events, and tone will shift as one generation hands the shop to the next. He has already begun that process, planning to mentor a second-year English major this summer by bringing him along to a book sale and involving him in curating the poetry section. The goal is to sustain the bookstore in a way that allows it to continue bridging the gap between the University and the Charlottesville area for years to come.
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