Troubadour Booksellers Set to Open in Southeast Charlotte

Scott Miller’s new bookshop isn’t even open yet and he’s already taking my money.

Stopping by Troubadour Booksellers on a recent afternoon to interview Miller, I couldn’t bring myself to leave without buying a few things that he’d stocked in preparation for the store’s grand opening on Sardis Road North on Oct. 19. Whether this is a testament to Miller’s curatorial acumen or my desperate book addiction is anyone’s guess.

I first met Miller in the early 2000s when we were both young actors working local stages together. Very early on I was struck by Miller’s bookishness as an actor. He approached roles with care and with an aptitude for script analysis that let you know: This guy is a reader.

During breaks at rehearsal or in a dressing room before shows we’d argue the finer points of Othello and I’d conceal my jealousy at Scott having spent time in Chicago, a hotbed for exciting new plays and the people who write them since the ’60s.

Fast forward a decade or so and Miller finds himself preparing for a different sort of opening night. This longtime bibliophile is now playing the role of that most noble of professions: a bookseller, as his east side bookshop Troubadour Booksellers prepares for its opening.

Chatting with Miller at his store in the frenzied final push to prepare for opening day, I was impressed by the coziness of the space, the thoughtfulness of Miller’s approach to business and the financial ruin that having a quality bookstore in my backyard is going to rain down upon me and my family.

“It could be drugs,” I’ll hiss at my long suffering wife as I bring another stack of László Krasznahorkai and Rachel Cusk novels home, “I could be spending our money on drugs!” Meanwhile our child starves and divorce lawyers circle like vultures.

Apart from a few remaining boxes of books, the shop was looking sharp during my visit. Shelves were fully stocked with books, locally crafted gifts were finding their onto display racks and Miller was tinkering with the display table that will greet customers upon arrival.

At the time the table was littered with books on witchcraft as well as folktales about goblins and cryptids, all appropriate for an October opening. Though Miller seemed relieved to sit down for a minute and take a breather, he was also buzzing with the unmistakable hum of someone on the verge of something big.

Troubadour Booksellers is the result of a lifetime of dreaming followed by about five years of serious planning. A lover of literature since early in life (he cites Hemingway’s The Old Man and The Sea and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road as formative reading experiences), Miller has always harbored the notion of opening his own bookstore, but the time wasn’t ever right and ultimately the dream seemed distant, unrealistic, a fantasy.

In recent years, after a COVID-era, life reappraisal of soul searching that many of us are familiar with, Miller got serious about his plan. He attended conventions and bookseller boot camps around the country, ventured into the shark-infested waters of BookTok and applied his years of experience in nonprofit fundraising to develop a business plan that should hopefully keep him in the black and his east Charlotte neighbors well stocked with reading material.

“It had been a dream for a long time and after COVID I started really thinking about it and the more I thought about it and the more I talked about it the more real it seemed,” he told me. “It was certainly inspiring to attend conferences and meet other people on the same journey. Maybe it wasn’t a completely crazy idea. There are reasonable people out there doing this. And I’m one of them. This is really happening! People want books in their lives and bookshops in their communities. Bookshops can actually be at the center of communities.”

This commitment to community, a likely holdover from his years working local stages, is what he thinks sets an independent bookshop apart from an Amazon or even a Barnes and Noble.

When designing the layout of the store the Troubadour team was very intentional about creating a space that said “we want people to feel comfortable here.”

In some ways it’s obvious: There are overstuffed couches and chairs scattered through the space just begging for customers to sit down with a pile of books and start the process of figuring out which ones they must bring home with them. Other choices are a little more subtle, such as the changing tables (with complimentary diaper-changing supplies) in the bathroom. That accessory, which seems to be vanishing from a lot of public spaces, lets parents know that they and their children are welcome.

A parent himself (he and wife Robin Tynes-Miller, co-founder of Three Bone Theatre, have a daughter together), Miller knows how inhospitable businesses can be to those with children in tow. Troubadour features a kids nook and plans to host storytimes for little ones in addition to a full selection of books for adults across a variety of genres.

When I visited the shop the shelves were stocked in anticipation of the store’s opening, giving me a chance to browse. I was impressed by Miller’s curation, finding plenty of literary fiction to satisfy my taste along with history, memoir, biography and other nonfiction.

Seeing a robust selection of manga on the shelves sparked a conversation about the potential pitfalls of needing to stock books outside of one’s own reading preferences.

“I was pretty ignorant about manga but when I was talking to people about opening a bookstore it was the genre that people kept mentioning, so I knew I needed to stock some,” he recalled. “Luckily I have a friend who is really into it and they were able to steer me towards the good stuff.”

And so personal connections, as well as keeping a weather eye on social media, has been instrumental in helping Miller stock work that will appeal to a broad range of readers (in addition to being communities of readers, #bookstagram and BookTok have become actual market forces that move big numbers of books.)

Miller is also enthusiastic in describing the process of hiring part-time help for the store, meeting and hiring people who love books as much as he does, and who perhaps have a special love for, and expertise in, different corners of the literary landscape.

“Part of the hiring process is talking to applicants about what they’re into,” he explained. “That’s going to be a part of their job. I want them to be a part of that curating process.”

It’s this willingness to step outside of one’s ego and acknowledge the tastes of others that convinces me of the sincerity of Miller’s hopes that Troubadour will continue the grand tradition of independent record stores and bookshops as community spaces.

Making the case that real life spaces where people can gather over a love of shared interests are vital in our ever more digital, ever more alienated world, Miller said, “If you create that really unique personable customer experience that you see in the best record stores and bookstores, where you know the people who are selling the books and you trust their taste, you don’t have that experience anywhere else. That’s community.”

As a final thought for those for whom the bookstore as community center doesn’t move the needle, consider this: The addition of Troubadour to the Sardis Crossing shopping center might be a game changer for southeast Charlotte date nights. The shop is just a few doors down from New Zealand Cafe (which for my money serves the best sushi in Charlotte), and given that establishment’s popularity, it only makes sense to put in your name at New Zealand and go browse books while you wait on your table.

Head across Monroe Road to the movie theater after dinner and things are looking good in the “getting lucky” department.

Troubadour Booksellers (located at 1721 Sardis Road North) will open on Saturday, Oct. 19 from 11 a.m.-8 p.m. There will be a children’s storytime at noon and Charlotte Poet Laureate Jay Ward will read from his new book and sign copies. To celebrate the opening everyone will receive 10% off their first book purchased. General store hours will be 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday and noon-5pm Sunday, closed on Mondays.