Two McDonald’s franchisees bought a derelict nineteenth century building in downtown Tampa and put a bookstore at the middle of it. That sentence is true, and it’s the least likely origin story in this entire series. It’s also the best one.
The question they started from is the part worth keeping. Where can people spend time together, and talk, and exchange ideas? Their answer was a bookshop, and everything else in the building grew around it.
McDonald’s franchisees aren’t where I’d have looked for a bookstore worth admiring, and yet here we are. Two people who could have made easy money off that building asked where people go to talk to each other and answered with books. I think that’s a better question than most bookstore founders ever ask.
Six thousand nine hundred and fifty-one Google reviews. That’s more than three times the count of anything else in this series, chain stores included. For a bookstore, that number is absurd in the best way.
What is Oxford Exchange?
A building with several businesses inside it, one of which is a bookshop, at 420 West Kennedy Boulevard in Tampa. The phone is 813-253-0222 and the site is oxfordexchange.com. Under one roof there’s The Restaurant, a coffee shop, a tea room serving afternoon tea daily, The Shop selling books and homeware, The Commerce Club as a members-only shared workspace, a design studio and an event venue. Warby Parker and Aesop have taken space inside as well.
The rooms are individually designed and the materials were chosen deliberately, so the character changes as you move through the building. Marble and leather here, brass and exposed brick there. People who come in for brunch end up writing about the bookstore. That isn’t the usual direction of travel.
Reservations are advised for the restaurant. Downtown parking is the recurring complaint. It’s a fair gripe and the only one worth taking seriously.
The building was a stable
Constructed in 1891, and it’s believed to have started life as a stable.
It sits directly across from what was Henry B. Plant’s Tampa Bay Hotel, the resort he built to draw tourists down to Florida.
It ran until 1932 and then became the University of Tampa. The proximity to that hotel is the entire reason this building existed at all. Guests arrived, and their horses needed somewhere to go.
In the 1920s an arcade of local shops and businesses filled the space, and the current design echoes that arrangement on purpose. Then came decades of vacancy and a building that preservationists worried about openly. Blake Casper bought the property in 2011 and spent about a year and a half on the restoration with his sister. Most of the painstaking work went into the century-old brickwork. It opened on September 24, 2012. I respect anybody who pulls an 1891 building back from decades of vacancy, even before they sell a single book in it. Too many old buildings in Florida end up as parking lots, and a year and a half of brickwork is a choice somebody had to keep making week after week.
Who built Oxford Exchange in Tampa?
Blake Casper and Allison Casper Adams, brother and sister, Tampa natives, third-generation McDonald’s franchisees. Their grandfather Fritz Casper opened the first McDonald’s in Tampa in the 1950s. The family now works more than fifty restaurants across the area through Caspers Company. Blake joined the business in 1996 after graduating from the London School of Economics, working his way up through the operator program.
The London years are visible in every room. Casper drew on places he knew there: the Wolseley, the Shaw Library at the LSE, and the Garrick Club. That’s why afternoon tea is served every single day in a building on Kennedy Boulevard, and why it doesn’t feel like an affectation when it happens. Allison Casper Adams runs the retail side as director. Her advice to anybody thinking about opening a shop, given in an interview, wasn’t to listen to the people who tell you it won’t work.
How is the bookstore arranged?
Thematically instead of by conventional category, and the reasoning behind that’s the most interesting piece of bookselling thinking in this series. The shop’s early buying philosophy was that “everyone should be forced to look at everything.” A reader who would never walk into a short story section may find Raymond Carver or Chekhov if the shop organizes the shelf around what those writers are about. Somebody hunting history brushes past romance on the way to it.
That line is the best bookselling philosophy I’ve come across in this whole series. Departments keep readers in their lanes, and a shelf built around what books are about drags them out of those lanes and into Chekhov. I’d like to see every chain try it for a year.
The buying followed from a clear premise about what a physical bookstore is for in the age of the e-reader. If what you’re selling is a browsing experience and the pleasure of books as objects, then you buy things people want to own and things most bookstores won’t carry.
Classics have accounted for as much as half of the shop’s book sales, which almost no general bookstore in the country can say. That’s a direct consequence of the shelving decision, and it’s worth thinking about for a moment. Organise a shop around what books are about instead of which department they belong to, and people buy Chekhov. The shop also runs author events and question and answer sessions in partnership with the University of Tampa’s MFA program. That’s across the road.
What does Oxford Exchange offer readers?
The room is the obvious answer. Open at half past seven in the morning, coffee, tables, and a building designed around people staying in it. For a long working morning in Tampa it’s among the best options available, and I’ve covered the alternatives in where to write in Tampa.
The less obvious answer is the shelf. A thematically arranged bookstore where half of what sells is classics is a completely different signal from a table of new releases. If you want to see what survives, and what a buyer with a point of view thinks is worth owning as an object, this is the shelf to stand in front of.
Writers fixated on this month’s bestseller list should spend an hour at this shelf. Trends burn out in a season, and the books people still want to own a century later are the ones worth studying.
That’s a different question from what is selling this month, and it’s the one that matters more for anybody writing something they hope will last.
The MFA connection also means the events calendar leans literary. For a Tampa writer, knowing that the university program and the bookstore run things together is worth more than it sounds.
When is Oxford Exchange open?
Monday through Friday from half past seven in the morning until half past five, Saturday and Sunday from eight until half past five. Seven days and an early opening. That’s unusual in this series. The half past five closing is the constraint. This is a morning and afternoon building, and anyone expecting an evening bookstore should look at Book + Bottle or Mojo instead. Parking is the real weak point. Kennedy Boulevard is downtown Tampa and reviewers say finding a space takes patience. Restaurant reservations are worth making in advance.
From Clearwater, around forty minutes across the bay.
Where it sits
Nothing else in this series is directly comparable. That’s exactly why it’s easy to overlook when you go looking for bookstores. A search for bookstores surfaces bookstores. This is a building with a bookstore in it. Against the rest of Tampa, Black English is a small chosen room with a single editorial premise. Mojo is the large used generalist with vinyl and a coffee bar. Steamy Lit is the genre specialist. TampaAntiquesandBooks is the antiquarian room. Oxford Exchange is the destination, the one people bring visitors to and the one that ends up on every list of things to do in Tampa. (See also the 1891 hotel a short walk away) (See also the bungalow bookshop in Ybor that took four years to open)
For authors, one practical note: it orders through Ingram and has a reputation among local writers for being harder to get onto than the smaller independents. That’s a function of scale and curation, not unfriendliness, and the piece on getting onto a Tampa Bay shelf covers the approach.
That doesn’t bother me in the least. A shop that picks carefully should be hard to get into, and an author who wins a spot on those shelves has won something worth having.
A question answered with a bookstore
Two McDonald’s franchisees could have done almost anything with a vacant nineteenth century building on Kennedy Boulevard. Offices. Apartments. Another restaurant. That’s the thing they know how to run. They restored the brickwork, put a bookshop at the center, and built a restaurant, a tea room and a workspace around it, because the question they were trying to answer was about where people go to talk to each other.
Fourteen years later it’s the most reviewed destination in Tampa Bay book retail by a factor of three, and the building that used to house horses serves afternoon tea every day.
More developers should give that answer. Put a bookstore at the heart of a building and people come to talk, eat, work and stay, and fourteen years of reviews say the bet was right. Tampa is damn lucky to have it.
