Owner of Palouse Books Viva Stowell has worked in bookstores since the ’90s. She and her husband decided they wanted their own bookstore in a college town, selecting Moscow in 2014.
“As a kid, I was that kid reading and walking home. When I was really young, there was a point I thought I wanted to be a librarian. But I don’t think I would like that really — too much politics, too much bureaucracy. It is kind of like being a professor, there is a lot of politics involved in institutions. Bookstores can be the same when they get really big. You go to Powell’s in Portland and there are politics internally. But it is just nice. If I didn’t have a bookshop, I would buy books all the time anyway, so it is kind of a way to facilitate that.”