She Spent Years Handing People Books. Now She’s Opening a Shop on Lebanon Road.
For most of Mt. Juliet's history, buying a book here has meant one of two things: a drive toward Nashville, or a screen and a shopping cart. Come late September, there will be a third option, and it will have a door on Lebanon Road.
The Open Shelf Books, which bills itself as Mt. Juliet's only independent bookstore, is preparing to move out of a corner of somebody else's shop and into a storefront of its own. Owner Megan Austin — a former librarian and bookseller — has been running the business as a pop-up tucked inside The Village Forager, the gift shop and coffee bar at 2320 N. Mt. Juliet Road that has been a fixture here since 2023. The books sit there Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., alongside the lattes and the loose tea and the little greenhouse out back. On weekends the operation travels: markets around Wilson County, a folding table, a curated stack.
That is a familiar shape for a certain kind of American small business right now. The bookstore that begins as a cart, a booth, or a shelf in a friend's shop, and grows into a lease. It is how a good many of the independents that opened across the country over the past decade got their start — the ones that came back after the big-box contraction hollowed out so many downtowns.
What Austin sells is a mix: new titles and used ones, pre-orders for the books people are waiting on, children's picks, bookmarks and stickers, and a “Blind Date with a Book” rack — the wrapped-in-paper gamble where you buy the description and never see the cover. The through-line is curation. The shop's own framing is that choosing a book ought to feel personal again: slower, more deliberate, and not handed to you by an algorithm. In a county where the nearest shelf of new releases has long been a chain endcap or a search box, that is a real pitch.
The most interesting part of the plan, though, is not retail at all.
Austin wants to put free books in the hands of middle and high school students in Mt. Juliet. The reason that matters takes a minute to explain, and it is worth the minute.
Tennessee children already get free books — a great many of them. Dolly Parton's Imagination Library mails one book a month to every enrolled child in the state, from birth until the month they turn five, funded county by county in partnership with the state. It is one of the most successful literacy programs in the country, and Wilson County kids have grown up inside it. And then, on a child's fifth birthday, it stops.
That is the gap Austin is aiming at. The years when reading stops being something a parent does at bedtime and becomes something a kid either chooses or doesn't — sixth grade, eighth grade, tenth — are precisely the years when nobody is mailing anyone anything. A free book in a fourteen-year-old's hands is a harder sell and a smaller headline than a board book for a toddler. It is also, arguably, the more consequential one.
None of this arrives with a corporate ribbon and a press release. It is one person with a librarian's worth of experience, a corner of a gift shop, and a lease she is about to sign. Mt. Juliet has long billed itself Tennessee's fastest-growing city and mostly proved it in rooftops and roadwork. Storefronts like this one — and the decade-old marketplace of more than fifty makers a little further along Lebanon Road — are the slower kind of growth: the kind that turns a place people commute from into a place they walk around in.
The Open Shelf's permanent location is expected to open in late September or early October. Until then, the shelf is still in the coffee shop.
More local shops worth knowing: bookstores in and around Mt. Juliet.
