Book + Bottle, St. Petersburg: Open Three Days, Then the World Closed

Fourteen months of planning. A lease. An inventory of books and wine. A team hired and trained.

Three days later the state shut down.

Book + Bottle opened in March 2020, which is the worst possible week in modern history to open anything, and it’s still here six years later with five hundred and sixty-two Google reviews at four point eight.

I find that story thrilling. Somebody bet fourteen months of her life on a bookstore with a wine bar and then refused to fold when the state closed three days in. The reason she pulled it off is the most interesting thing about the place.

What is Book + Bottle?

The shop’s own description is a bookstore with wine and a wine shop with books, and that’s the real version. It’s also a coffee cafe and a bottle shop you can buy from and take home.

The address is 17 6th Street North, just off Central Avenue in downtown St. Petersburg, tucked between a florist and a boutique. The phone is 727-240-7448 and the site is bookandbottlestpete.com. The book curation is tight and literary. Literary fiction is the core, with new releases, book club picks and bestsellers around it, and small dedicated sections covering the environment, cooking, wine, women, local literature, and Russian literature. That last one is a local joke that’s also entirely serious. St. Petersburg, Florida was named by Peter Demens after St. Petersburg, Russia, where he was from. A shelf of Russian literature in a downtown bookshop is a city acknowledging where its own name came from, and almost nobody notices it’s there. I adore that Russian shelf. It’s a quiet joke with real history behind it, and only a shop run by somebody who grew up here would think to do it.

The drinks list runs wine by the glass and by the bottle, beer, coffee, tea and snacks, with gluten-free and vegan options stocked. The wifi is strong and the seating is comfortable. One customer, reaching for the shortest possible summary, called it “a gem of a place in downtown St. Pete.”

Who is Terra Dunham?

A St. Petersburg native who came home to open this.

She grew up here, went to St. Petersburg High School, and remembers her father taking her to Haslam’s to buy used Nancy Drew books. That’s a properly local origin for a properly local business. Later she was living in Denver, working out of a place called BookBar, a bookstore and wine bar, watching the model work in front of her.

She’s said she kept watching other people live their dream and run the businesses they wanted. That’s the sentence that precedes every career change anybody has ever made.

Her reasoning about the concept is worth repeating because it’s unusually clear-eyed. She wanted something that would hold up in a downturn. Bookstores were coming back and she liked the idea of a small wine bar, and leaning entirely on either one felt risky. So she did both.

That’s smart thinking, and I wish more small-business owners did it. Most people open the shop they dream about and never ask what happens in a bad year. She asked before signing anything.

Then she spent fourteen months on the build. Research, planning, permitting, and talking to every single person who would talk to her. Her own summary of how she started is that the only difference between other entrepreneurs and her was that they’d done it, so she buckled down and did it. The business is independent, woman-owned, and describes itself as values-driven, sustainably run and local-first. Her mother Cheryl works there. One customer, having spent an afternoon in the place, simply wrote: “Terra and her team are wonderful.”

The worst opening week in retail history

The hedge Dunham built in for economic reasons turned out to be the thing that survived a public health emergency. That’s partly luck. It’s also the payoff of having thought about the downside at the design stage instead of assuming the good case. Both halves of the inventory were deliverable. Books travel. Wine travels. And both were exactly what people wanted during a lockdown. That isn’t something anybody could have predicted in January.

The shop pivoted to delivery and curbside for around two months and kept trading with the sales floor dark.

Two months of selling books and wine out of a dark shop takes grit. Plenty of businesses folded that spring, and knowing that makes me respect this one all the more.

Six years later it’s one of the busiest independents in the city and somewhere close to the most reviewed.

What is Book + Bottle in St. Petersburg like inside?

Customers describe it in nearly identical terms. That’s usually a sign a place has a strong identity and knows it.

It’s a third place, and one reviewer used exactly that phrase: “I love the atmosphere; it’s truly a third place.” Somewhere to work with a laptop for a few hours, to meet somebody for happy hour, to take a date, or to sit alone with a book and a glass and be left completely unbothered. People mention the staff by name and describe conversations about what to read and what to drink, with recommendations that hit more often than they miss. The events calendar is serious and varied enough that reviewers single it out as different from what other shops run. Wine tastings, author talks, children’s readings and book clubs were all in the plan from the beginning and all of them happen. One customer, caught in a downpour, wrote that they “sat inside during a Florida summer storm and didn’t want to leave.” If you’ve ever been caught in one of those, you’ll understand that this is very high praise for a room.

Why should a writer use this room?

Two reasons, and the first one is practical to the point of dull.

It’s open when you can work. Tuesday until nine. Wednesday through Saturday ten in the morning until nine at night. Sunday noon until seven.

The Clearwater Main Library closes at seven at the latest and is shut all weekend. Most of the independents in this county lock up between five and six. If your writing happens after dinner, the list of rooms available to you in Pinellas County is short, and this is on it.

The second is the curation. A shelf built around literary fiction by somebody with strong opinions is a reading list. If you write literary fiction and want to know what’s being published and championed right now, that shelf is more useful than any bestseller chart, because a person chose every title on it and will tell you why if you ask.

Literary writers should make regular trips to shelves like this one. A bestseller chart tells you what sold last month. A bookseller with opinions tells you where the field is heading, and I’d trust that person with my reading list any day. For events, the shop runs author talks as a regular part of the calendar, and the usual approach applies. Be a customer first, attend somebody else’s night, understand the shelf, then ask. I set the process out in getting your book into a Tampa Bay bookstore.

When is Book + Bottle open?

Closed Monday. Tuesday noon until nine. Wednesday through Saturday ten in the morning until nine at night. Sunday noon until seven.

Those Wednesday to Saturday hours are the longest of any independent bookstore in this series, and they’re the single best reason to know this place exists.

Downtown St. Petersburg parking is metered street parking plus garages, and 6th Street North sits just off Central in the thick of it. Weekend evenings the area is busy. That’s both the appeal and the parking problem. Allow a few minutes and accept the walk. From Clearwater, around twenty-five minutes.

How does it compare to The Book Lounge?

St. Petersburg now has two bookstores with bars in them and the difference between them is real. Book + Bottle leans wine shop and literary curation, with a bottle list assembled by somebody who calls herself an oenophile without embarrassment and small sections on the environment, cooking and Russian literature. It reads adult and slightly serious, in the good way.

The Book Lounge on Central Avenue leans further toward cafe and games, with romance and romantasy on the shelves, board games on the tables, and frosé.

Neither competes with Tombolo, which is the pure bookstore with the serious author calendar, or with Wilson’s Book World. That’s fifty years of used stock and a comic shop in the back. Four shops, four jobs, all within a few miles. That’s a healthier book town than a city this size has any right to be.

What three days taught it

A business that opened three days before a shutdown and is still trading six years later knows something about its own value that most retail never has to find out. Nobody needed a bookstore in March 2020. People wanted books and wine delivered to their door and they wanted it from somebody local, and they kept wanting it afterwards when the doors reopened and they could have gone back to ordering from a warehouse in another state.

That’s the human element Dunham said she was trying to revive back when she was still promoting the idea from a table at a festival before the shop existed. It turns out she was right about it, under conditions nobody would have chosen to test it in.

Dunham called that one correctly, and it cheers me to see it. People like to claim customers always drift back to the cheapest option, and this shop proves plenty of them won’t if a local business gives them a reason. If you live anywhere near downtown St. Pete, give it your Friday evening.

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