Most used bookstores will tell you to call ahead before bringing in a collection. Most dealers ask for an appointment, and they’re right to, because a surprise carload wrecks an afternoon of somebody’s sorting.
Mojo buys from noon until six. Every day. No appointment. Turn up whenever suits you with books, records, CDs, cassettes, DVDs or equipment, and somebody will look at it.
That’s six open hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, and it’s the single most generous buying policy in this region by a wide margin.
That policy is a gift. Anybody who has ever had to clear out a house knows the misery of calling five dealers and getting five appointments two weeks out. A counter that says bring it whenever and we’ll look is the most useful thing a used store can offer the public, and it’s far rarer than it ought to be.
What is Mojo Books & Records?
An independent store at 2554 East Fowler Avenue in Tampa, a few minutes from the University of South Florida. The phone is 813-971-9717, the site is mojotampa.com, and the email is still a Comcast address. That’s reassuring in a way I can’t fully justify.
Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors
The floor runs about forty-five hundred square feet after an expansion. That makes it the largest used and new book and record store in Tampa. It opened in 2007 in what the shop itself describes as a nook of another store, so the current footprint is the end of a very long climb.
One thousand six hundred and fifty-seven Google reviews at four point six. That’s the second-highest review count in this entire series, behind only the Clearwater Barnes & Noble, and the highest of any independent in the bay by a distance. A shop next to a university with forty thousand students accumulates a great many opinions.
The book side is broad and the specialties are specific: scholarly nonfiction, classic and modern literature, science fiction and fantasy, entertainment with a deep run of music and film books, art, and religion and metaphysics. New titles sit alongside used, and signed copies turn up.
The music side carries new and used vinyl, CDs, cassettes, and movies on DVD and Blu-ray, plus equipment. Reviewers put most vintage records at or under ten dollars depending on condition.
The coffee and tea bar serves locally roasted coffee brewed by hand, espresso drinks, organic loose-leaf teas and vegan baked goods. The wifi is free.
Why does an open buying counter matter?
Because a used store lives or dies on the freshness of what is on the shelf, and freshness is entirely a function of what comes through the door. A shop that buys by appointment controls its intake and protects its staff time. A shop that commits to six hours of open buying every single day is making the opposite bet: volume in means volume out, and the cost of sorting is worth paying for the chance that today’s carload contains something extraordinary. I like that bet. A used store that plays it safe ends up with the same tired paperbacks on the shelf for a decade, and I’d take a messier counter with fresh stock over a tidy one with nothing new. It also makes this the easiest counter in the bay to reach if you’re clearing a house, thinning a collection, or finally admitting that the cassettes aren’t coming back into rotation. Compare that to the rest of the field. Back in the Day Books in Dunedin buys by appointment and asks you to call first. Bitter End in Ozona sources from collectors and at auction. Both approaches are entirely legitimate and neither is as convenient on a random Tuesday.
One exception worth knowing: no buybacks or trades on Record Store Day itself, because the entire staff is otherwise occupied.
Record Store Day and the listening parties
Mojo treats Record Store Day as its high holiday, in April and again on Black Friday, and orders close to everything on the list. The shop’s own claim is the largest Record Store Day selection around, and nothing I could find contradicts it. Beyond that there are listening parties. The shop books an evening around a new release, puts it on, hands out swag while it lasts, and runs a prize draw. Small idea, executed consistently, and it’s the sort of thing that turns a shop into a habit. If you’ve only ever shopped for music through a subscription service, an evening where thirty people listen to the same record at the same time in the same room is a different experience entirely. There aren’t many places left offering it anywhere.
A room full of strangers hearing a record together is something worth keeping alive. The streaming services gave us every song ever recorded and took away the part where you shared one with anybody.
Why would a reader go to a record store?
Three reasons, and the first is the one I’d drive for.
A room full of strangers hearing a record together is something worth keeping alive.
The music and film books. That section is deep here and thin nearly everywhere else. Biographies, oral histories, scene histories, technical books about production. If you want to understand a period, the music writing of that period is the fastest route into how it felt from the inside, and secondhand is the only affordable way to read widely in it.
Second, religion and metaphysics is a named specialty. That’s rare. Most general used shops have a shelf and hope. A store that lists it as a specialty has depth, and for anybody researching belief, folk practice, or the stranger corners of American spiritual history, that matters a great deal. I’d drive there for that section alone. Books on folk belief and the odd corners of American spiritual history are exactly the ones publishers never reprint, and a store that treats them as a specialty is doing any writer researching that ground a real favor.
Third, the room itself. Coffee bar, free wifi, seating, open until eight six nights a week. It’s a working space, and it sits near enough to campus that the ambient noise is people studying instead of people shouting. For a long afternoon on a manuscript, that’s a usable environment, and Tampa doesn’t have many that stay open that late.
When is Mojo Books & Records open?
Monday through Saturday eleven in the morning until eight at night, Sunday eleven until seven. Seven days, and eight o’clock closings. That puts it among the later-closing shops in the whole series. Fowler Avenue is a major artery and the store has parking. The location near USF means the crowd skews student during term time and the shop is busier in the evenings. That’s the correct problem for a business to have. From Clearwater this is the longest drive in the series, around forty-five minutes depending on the bridge and the hour. It’s also the one store that most justifies the trip on volume alone, since nothing on the Pinellas side combines books and records at anything close to this scale.
Where it sits
Tampa’s independents split cleanly and Mojo is the generalist with the largest footprint.
Black English in Tampa Heights is a small chosen room built around Black authors. Steamy Lit in South Tampa is romance. TampaAntiquesandBooks is rare and antiquarian across multiple rooms. Oxford Exchange is a restored 1891 building with a bookstore at its center.
Across the bay, The Book Rescuers in Largo beats Mojo on sheer book volume and price, and Wilson’s Book World matches it on density with a comic room where the record floor would be. Neither has vinyl or a coffee bar.
What Mojo has that nothing else in the region does is the combination. Books, records and coffee in one large room open until eight, with a buying counter running six hours a day.
My take
Make the drive for the religion and metaphysics section alone. Books on folk belief and the odd corners of American spiritual history rarely get reprinted, and a store that treats them as a specialty is doing writers a favor. Add the music writing for period research, a buying counter open six hours a day with no appointment, and a coffee bar open until eight most nights. It’s the longest drive in the series from Clearwater. Nothing on the Pinellas side combines books and records at this scale.
Nineteen years from a nook
The shop started in 2007 in a corner of somebody else’s store. It now occupies forty-five hundred square feet on one of Tampa’s busiest roads and is the city’s largest independent for books and records both.
That happened across the exact period when physical media was declared finished twice over, first for books and then for music. Vinyl came back and used books never really left, and a shop that had both of them in the same room turned out to be positioned for a recovery that nobody predicted and a lot of people bet against.
The print-is-dead crowd was wrong twice over, and I enjoy that more than I probably should. A shop that climbed from a nook to the biggest room in the city while everybody was writing its obituary is the best rebuttal I can think of. Nineteen years later the coffee is hand-poured, the buying counter is open, and somebody is flipping through a crate. If you live anywhere in the bay and haven’t made the drive up Fowler, you’re missing the strongest case for physical media in the region. Bring a box of books you’re finished with and come away with a crate of records.
