Fred Nagurney’s 5-year-old eyes, framed by red-rimmed glasses resting on rosy cheeks, lit up as he flipped through a “Young Jedi” sticker collection book at the Little Shop of Stories children’s bookstore in Decatur on June 28.
He and his mother, Sarah O’Brien, have been visiting the store on the Decatur Square since before Nagurney was a year old.
Credit: abbey.cutrer@ajc.com
Credit: abbey.cutrer@ajc.com
They were there to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the shop. Staff served up vanilla sheet cakes with loads of white frosting and sprinkles. Children delighted in a book scavenger hunt. And the shop’s current co-owners, Diane Capriola and Sunny Bowles, hugged dozens of regulars who all entered the shop as if entering the home of a close friend.
For 23-year-old Gildea Katz, the shop has been a home away from home. She has been coming to the shop since she was 3 years old when her mother, Kathleen Kelly, started bringing her for story time.
As a child, Katz attended Little Shop’s Harry Potter summer camp, learning to make potions and fly on a broomstick. As a teenager, she was a camp counselor. Now a college student, she comes to visit the shop whenever she’s in town. Soon she will move to London to attend University College and earn her master’s degree in literature — a choice, she said, influenced by her love of books, which was born and blossomed at Little Shop of Stories.
“(The shop)] has been a really good anchor for her, and a community for her, to come here and the staff know who she is,” Kelly said. “That’s a good thing for everybody to have places where people know you. And as a mom, you want your kids to be known.”
Credit: abbey.cutrer@ajc.com
Credit: abbey.cutrer@ajc.com
Toward the back of the shop, in a replica of the green room from the classic children’s book “Goodnight Moon,” Tazin Aijaz, 38, from Decatur, perused books with her daughter Asiya, 6, and son Zayd, 10. She recalled wandering into the store for the first time and noticing something striking.
“Growing up as a child of immigrants, I think the first thing I noticed is how diverse the selection is and how you feel represented in all the books,” she said. “ … I don’t think I had that when I was younger growing up.”
Credit: abbey.cutrer@ajc.com
Credit: abbey.cutrer@ajc.com
The long history of a little shop
Twenty years ago, Capriola had envisioned a shop with a welcoming atmosphere for families. In 1996, when she gave birth to her first child Nick, she started reading a lot of children’s books.
As a kid, she had been a passionate reader prone to escaping in the pages of a good book. But something about having Nick reinvigorated her love of stories.
Two more babies followed.
Credit: abbey.cutrer@ajc.com
Credit: abbey.cutrer@ajc.com
“We were a reading family,” she remembered. “We were raising our family in Decatur, and Decatur was becoming this really great community of young families, people who wanted to support small local business.”
At the time, the Decatur Square was growing.
“I just had this dream of, wow, this would be such a great place for a little children’s bookstore,” Capriola recalled. “I tossed around that idea for a while and then had somebody challenge me on it: ‘You either need to make this happen or you need to move on,’ they said.”
She accepted the challenge. The timing was right.
“My youngest was going to be starting pre-K five days a week. I was going to have all three of the kids in school,” she said. “I had been a school psychologist, and I knew I didn’t want to go back to that.”
Capriola started to reach out to members of her community. In 2004 she sent an email describing her dream and seeking collaborators to make it happen.
“I believe that if I had a partner or partners to join me in this endeavor, a children’s bookstore in Decatur would thrive and be supported and embraced by the community,” the letter read.
Dave Shallenberger, who was an attorney who had served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Malaysia, could see Capriola’s vision. He joined her to make the dream a reality. So did Terra McVoy, the only one of the trio with any bookstore experience, who became store manager.
Capriola and Shallenberger attended a bookseller’s workshop in Chicago to get a crash course in bookstore ownership, and on July 1, 2005, Little Shop of Stories opened on N. McDonough Street, below Eddie’s Attic.
That first summer, the shop held a creative writing camp and a chess camp, building a foundation for what would become a robust summer camp program.
Credit: abbey.cutrer@ajc.com
Credit: abbey.cutrer@ajc.com
In 2008, when a larger storefront with more foot traffic opened up not far from the Little Shop space, Capriola moved the shop across the square to its current location at 133 E. Court Square.
“Literally, a month after we moved in and our overhead cost went up, the recession hit,” Capriola remembered. “It was an interesting time. It got hard to pay the bills, but we survived.”
Throughout the early years, Capriola juggled the business and three children. They were a regular presence at the shop, making it a true family business.
“I wreaked havoc on the store … bothering all my mom’s employees,” said daughter Jen Capriola, 24, who fondly recalls those days, getting ice cream with her siblings on the square and running around the store. In her early teens she was a summer camp counselor. When she turned 16, she started working there every Saturday, and she came when she was home from college in New York.
Looking back, Jen Capriola feels gratitude now.
“I was super spoiled and I didn’t even know it,” she said. “To have just bookshelves filled with amazing books … then, we would get to go meet the authors … I think that felt really normal to me.
“But now I realize how special it is to have access to people advocating literacy … getting to meet creatives, writers and illustrators that really encouraged both creativity and also silliness and appreciation for kids … It was super special and very impactful.”
By 2016, after making it through the recession and growing its customer base, Little Shop of Stories expanded into an adjoining space roughly doubling its footprint to the size it is now.
Beyond the bookshop walls
The shop’s impact reaches far beyond its brick-and-mortar walls through its community collaborations, events and programs.
In 2006, Little Shop of Stories formed a partnership with Daren Wang and Tom Bell, who were launching the inaugural Decatur Book Festival that Labor Day weekend. Little Shop participated in the children’s and teen programming held in a small tent with 30 chairs on the lawn in front of the then-new Decatur courthouse.
By 2013, Capriola’s role with the festival was formalized as she became the Children’s and Teen Program Manager — a role she held through the 2019 festival when the position was eliminated at the beginning of the pandemic.
In 2023, the Little Shop of Stories launched its own Children’s Book Festival in partnership with the Decatur Arts Alliance, which hosts the Decatur Arts Festival in May.
“We happen to think that children’s books are works of art so the partnership made a lot of sense to all of us,” Capriola said.
The shop is also the organizer and operator of more than 60 school bookfairs around the metro Atlanta area. For 15 years, Bowles, who this year became a co-owner when Shallenberger retired, was in charge of them.
“I was able to make relationships with teachers and be out at the schools … curating the fairs and sharing books with people,” Bowles said. “Books are so important … You can discover your similarities, your differences, other people’s experiences and empathy.”
A caffeinated expansion
As the shop enters its 21st year of business, Capriola is gearing up to expand again.
In February, Little Shop of Stories announced it will take over the space next door, where a Starbucks lived before shutting down during the pandemic.
Credit: abbey.cutrer@ajc.com
Credit: abbey.cutrer@ajc.com
Little Shop will knock down the adjoining wall and transform the space into a café where customers can indulge in caffeinated beverages and where Little Shop can host other community engagement events.
Bowles is particularly excited because one of her goals is to increase engagement among middle graders and teenagers.
“The coffee shop will be a perfect space for them to hang out,” she said.
Local coffee shop and roasting company Bellwood Coffee will be Little Shop’s operating partner.
Bellwood co-founder and owner Joel Norman said he’s thrilled to open the café, both from a business standpoint and a personal one. Norman is a young father of two: infant Cate and toddler Patton.
At the 20-year anniversary celebration, Patton could be spotted gleefully entering the shop’s Harry Potter 9¾ platform, which Capriola built with the help of Tiny Doors ATL.
“He was wide-eyed and ready for adventure in here,” Norman said of Patton. “I think (seeing that) solidified what I was already excited about, which is just letting my kids grow up around this and around these people. It is going to be awesome.”
Even before he became a father, Norman and his brother and Bellwood business partner Charles Norman were admirers of Little Shop of Stories.
“This place has become a character. It feels so unique in Atlanta, and in Decatur as well,” he said. “The atmosphere in here just feels so authentic, and we just have been in love with that for a long time.”
At the anniversary celebration, Norman set up a pop-up coffee cart where he and a barista served samples of the brand’s fan-favorite beverages. The vegan cold brew horchata, made with spices, oat milk and cold brew coffee, was a clear draw for thirsty parents.
Little Shop will be Bellwood’s fifth location in addition to its brick-and-mortar locations in Riverside and East Atlanta Village, plus its two office park coffee stands. Norman said he plans to have a few signature items for the Little Shop location, including a new recipe for a frozen, slushy cold brew horchata.
While the opening date for the café has changed a few times, Norman said he is hopeful it will open by September or October.
Until then, Capriola and Bowles will continue to greet regulars and newcomers alike and host its summer camps and author events.
Meanwhile, Shallenberger is busy traveling abroad in retirement. Yet, he can’t truly escape the store or its impact, even in Greece.
“I was at the airport in Athens yesterday,” Shallenberger said via email. “A Little Shop customer approached me, told me how much the store has meant to her family, and that they had recently purchased their summer reading there. It’s not the first time this has happened to me overseas. But it’s always special.”
“That happened to me in Scotland,” Capriola replied to his email. “In May someone stopped me at the top of a mountain and asked, ‘Are you Diane from Little Shop of Stories?’”
Indeed, she is. The shop may be little, but its impact clearly has reach.
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