Announcing Our Summer 2025 Partner Bookstore: Page & Palette in Fairhope, Alabama!
A rambling bookstore on a busy corner refreshed by Gulf breezes welcomes visitors from all over the South and beyond
In 1968 Betty Joe Wolff opened a small shop selling art supplies and a few books in Fairhope, Alabama, “an absolutely charming town,” as local author Fannie Flagg describes it, “that sits on a high bluff overlooking the beautiful Mobile Bay.” “I was only ten years old the first time I saw Fairhope, and for me, it was love at first sight,” Fannie Flagg writes. The “laidback atmosphere and mild climate has lured intellectuals, free thinkers, artists, and writers from all over the country, including Sherwood Anderson, Upton Sinclair, Clarence Darrow, and best-selling authors of today such as Winston Groom, of Forrest Gump fame, Rick Bragg, Jimmy Buffett, and W.E.B Griffin, among others.” Eugene Walter, who was from Mobile, apparently “spent quite a lot of time over here living in a tree—living in a tree, with a cat because he said that was the way to be healthy with the gulf breeze.”
Some of Fairhope’s bohemian reputation owes to its origins. The town was founded in 1894 by a group of utopian idealists, readers of Edward Bellamy and Laurence Gronlund, who believed the private ownership of land was to blame for the growing inequality of industrialization. They pooled their resources and bought the land to start the town; what became the Fairhope Single Tax Corporation leased the town’s land to the settlers (it still owns around 4,500 acres around Fairhope), took responsibility for municipal services, and reserved the most beautiful bluffs and beach property as public parks. Fairhope had an organic school in the twenties and nudist beaches in the thirties, supported women’s suffrage, and opened one of the first public libraries in Alabama. Founder Ernest B. Gaston’s grandson, historian Paul Gaston, wrote that in the founders’ view the evil of land monopoly was conjoined with that of slavery, and Fairhope’s newspaper spoke out against the Klan and lynchings elsewhere in Alabama; nevertheless they bought out the Black farmers who had settled there and helped them to find adjoining land rather than open the original association to non-whites. Though the first generations of settlers lived simply and avoided concentrations of wealth, as the land becomes more valuable Fairhope remains haunted by this legacy of segregation and its cousin, gentrification.
Fairhope’s commitment to civic life and its nascent bookstore found common purpose. “Unlike a lot of small towns across America, whose local stores have fallen victim to large shopping malls and closed, Fairhope still has a bustling and thriving downtown,” Fannie Flagg writes in My Bookstore: Writers Celebrate Their Favorite Places to Browse, Read and Shop, “and if you should happen to visit and walk around Section Street, you would soon learn that the hub of most of that downtown activity is [Betty Joe’s] Page & Palette bookstore. And if you were to go inside, the other thing you might quickly observe is that Fairhope people, visitors and locals, just love to read.” She attributes Fairhope’s enthusiasm for reading to Betty Joe. “For as long as I can remember, customers have come to the door and called out, ‘Hey, Betty Joe, I need a good book—what do you recommend?’” Fannie Flagg remembers her very first book signing: “Betty Joe’s two little skinny ten-year-old twin granddaughters, Karin and Kelley, were on hand to open books and hand out cookies.” Karin bought the business from her grandmother in 1997 and her sister Kelley owns the adjoining art gallery. Karin’s daughter Tyler now manages the store. Karin was also mayor of Fairhope from 2016 to 2020. She has advocated for more inclusive land policies as well as small businesses and well-funded education. (The owner of our Winter 2023 partner bookseller, Square Books’s Richard Howorth, also served for a while as mayor, of Oxford, Mississippi.)
The now much expanded Page & Palette, in the words of one visitor, is “ a labyrinth of books, ideas, and community spaces that unfold like chapters in a particularly engrossing novel,” with outdoor seating and a café and a basement bar and event space that encourage happening in and lingering. “An epic bookstore,” said another visitor, “one of my favorite stores to wander into and lose track of time.” One bookstore pilgrim wrote: “The way I see it, come early for a latte and a pastry, browse for books and read, visit The Book Cellar when happy hour rolls around, and then hang out in The Book Cellar for whatever author event will be in that area during the evening. Good grief, just rent me a bedroom and I’m set!” But wait! You can book a bed-and-breakfast in an apartment above the store, or if you’re an author you can hunker down in Wolff Cottage (supported by the city of Fairhope and named for Betty Joe), and basically move in. The building’s welcoming demeanor, from its perch on a central corner, functions as Betty Joe once did inside the front door: an invitation to all to sit down and read, together.
Fairhope’s bookishness landed it in the news recently, as Alabama’s state library authority withdrew funding from Fairhope’s historic and capacious library because the library declined to remove books deemed inappropriately sexual by the state board from the shelves of books for teens. The library’s board reviewed the challenged books again after funding was revoked, and found, according to Alabama news site Al.com, that they had not “met requirements that might lead to relocating them into the adult section.” “They don’t have obscene material in them,” said library board member Randal Wright. Speaking of the book Sold, a 2006 novel about a Nepali girl forced into prostitution that was the first on the state’s list that the board revisited, “Looking at everything we think about [when considering a book’s relocation], it just doesn’t have anything in it that is prurient,” adding, “it’s so well written and has won lots of rewards.” (The library had earlier moved five challenged books to the adult section through its own procedures.) After the library declined to reverse its position, Fairhope residents raised $40,000 to replace the state funding. Jonathan Friedman of PEN believes it to be the first instance of a state withholding funds from a local public library over content restrictions. Randal Wright has said she believes the challenges were filed by a small number of people and activists with national organizations like Moms for Liberty. “The overall community is supportive of its library,” she said, though a New York Times report did find some Fairhope residents who resisted the library’s posture. The Times noted that Alabama voted squarely for President Trump and he won more than three quarters of Fairhope’s vote, yet many Trump voters stand by the library. “Don’t tell me I can’t read something,” one of them told the Times. “I’ll make that decision for me and my child.”
Pundits may argue over what podcasts political candidates should appear on, and what slogans should grace television ads and memes, but the presence every day of a beloved, well-trafficked, and well-stocked 7,000-square-foot bookstore and a 40,000-square-foot library recording 180,000 annual visits in the middle of a much-visited Southern town probably does more to deepen discourse than the work of a thousand political consultants.
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Page & Palette in Fairhope, Alabama, is Book Post’s Summer 2025 bookselling partner! We partner with independent booksellers to link to their books, support their work, and bring you news of local book life across the land. We send a free three-month subscription to any reader who spends more than $100 at our partner bookstore during our partnership. To claim your subscription send your receipt to info@bookpostusa.com.
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