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 is still here six years later with five hundred and sixty-two Google reviews at four point eight. The reason why is the most interesting thing about it.
What is Book + Bottle?
The shop’s own description is a bookstore with wine and a wine shop with books, and that is the honest version. It is 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 is 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 quietly acknowledging where its own name came from, and almost nobody notices it is there.
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, which is 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 has said she kept watching other people live their dream and run the businesses they wanted, which is the sentence that precedes every career change anybody has ever made.
Her reasoning about the concept is worth repeating because it is 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.
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 had 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 is partly luck. It is 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, which is not 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.
Six years later it is one of the busiest independents in the city and somewhere close to the most reviewed.
What is the room like?
Customers describe it in nearly identical terms, which is usually a sign a place has a strong identity and knows it.
It is a third place, and one reviewer used exactly that phrase: “I love the atmosphere; it is 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 land more often than they miss.
The events calendar is substantial 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 did not want to leave.” If you have ever been caught in one of those, you will 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 is 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 is 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.
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 whole thing out in getting your book into a Tampa Bay bookstore.
Hours, parking, and the Monday closure
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 are 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, which is 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, which is fifty years of used stock and a comic shop in the back.
Four shops, four jobs, all within a few miles. That is 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 is 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.
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