November 15, 2022, Dallastown, Pennsylvania — “It was forty years ago this week,” says Byron Borger co-owner with his wife Beth, of Hearts & Minds, a bookstore in Dallastown, PA, “when we opened our doors and the very first book we sold was Les Miserable by Victor Hugo.” That was before the musical, and Borger took it as a sign that their desire to sell thoughtful titles, especially intelligent faith-based books, was going to go well. They had stocked up with a full line of standard titles as well as what they considered to be the best of religious trade publishing, from the likes of Eerdmans, InterVarsity Press, Fortress, and Westminster Press. For a grand opening gift they gave out IVP’s little Your Mind Matters by John Stott and an autographed, slipcased edition of a brand new work by former President Jimmy Carter.
Byron and Beth worked for a Presbyterian Church near Pittsburgh in campus ministry in the late 1970s and came to realize how important books could be, especially for young adults searching for meaning and purpose. They bucked the growing trend of then popular rather sectarian, even insular, religious bookstores and what they call “equally limited secularized stores” and created what they came to describe as a bit of a hybrid approach. Long known in both CBA and ABA circles, the Borger’s have created a one-of-a-kind bookstore in a small town in South central PA. This black Friday (November 25th) is the start of their 40th anniversary year.“
Our region is known for tourists visiting from Gettysburg to Hershey to Amish Lancaster so we developed some mid-Atlantic notoriety and slowly build relationships with organizations running events in Baltimore, Philadelphia, DC, even New York, and doing off-site, pop-up bookstores for organizations like Washington’s C.S. Lewis Institute or the anti-poverty organization Bread for the World, or Mako Fujimura’s Christian arts gatherings in Manhattan became important to our work and expanded our footprint in the world,” Borger said. “We’ve served colleges in Boston and churches in Pittsburgh and have driven our van or rented trucks to conferences in Chicago, Orlando, Dallas.”
The more nation-wide customers came to appreciate their unique blend of conventional Christian literature and edgy, contemporary fiction and creative nonfiction, and their commitments to social justice and anti-racist work (“since the very beginning”, Borger insists) the more their off-site conferences and their mail order and website business took off, even while serving a regular local clientel. With a handful of full and part-time staff, they’ve developed a reputation in some circles as one of the more interesting bookstores in the country.
Beth and Byron roll their eyes at that, but it is true that to celebrate their 35th anniversary a festschrift was published in their honor with contributors from across the theological world, from Anglican theologian N. T Wright in the UK to ex-evangelical David Gushee in the US South to literature professors as unique as Southern Baptist Karen Swallow Prior and Roman Catholic thinker Gregory Wolfe, founder of Image Journal and indie literature publisher Slant Books. Boutique publisher Square Halo Books funded the project called A Book for Hearts & Minds: What You Should Read and Why — a Festschrift Honoring the Work of Hearts & Minds Bookstore.
Their small town location adds what Borger called a “down home touch” noting that the largest author event they’ve ever done in-store was hosting Beverly Lewis, known for her earnest Amish romance fiction. “We sell what many ordinary bookstores sell, not all high literature or deep theology, but we do have an emphasis on a wide spectrum of Christian stuff — evangelical, mainline Protestant, Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Mennonite and more,” he said. And this, too, sets Hearts & Minds apart, their principled commitment to featuring ecumenical titles. Few religious bookstores are as diverse as they are. “We’ve got something to offend everyone,” the Borger’s often quip. They have had their share of antagonists, some finding them too overtly Christian and others finding them too open-minded.
“When Covid hit we went out of our way to signal to the community that we were staying closed for the sake of the most vulnerable, those at risk, the disabled and often marginalized,” Borger reported. Anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers were not happy with the Borger’s decision to not re-open quickly in 2022 and their commitment to public health has made them look stubborn, at best.
“Still,” Borger says, “we enter this 40th anniversary week and our next year committed to doing the right thing and serving our customers the best we can in our now-legendary backyard and curbside customer service. And we’re mailing out books more eagerly than ever! We’ve faced the era of the big chains, the onslaught of Amazon, the detriment of ebooks, and the foibles of the often-judgmental religious community, and we’re still standing. We are grateful to God and to our customers for their commitments to our efforts, unique as they may be.”
Best sellers this past month include one of Borger’s favorites, Surrender, the new memoir by Bono (“we carried their albums when we first opened in the early 80s before they had really caught on,” Borger notes) and the two new Wendell Berry books, the hefty The Need to Be Whole (on race and patriotism) and the new collection of short stories set in fictional Port Royal, How It Went. They have taken a lot of pre-orders for the forthcoming Poetry Unbound collection by Padraig O’Tuama. Beth is always pushing any number of novels — most recently Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence and Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver. And Advent resources— they love serving the liturgical churches and their needs for resources throughout the seasons of the church calendar. Borger insists that one of his all time favorite books is the Eerdmans release by Episcopalian preacher Fleming Rutledge, Advent:The Once and Future Coming of Jesus Christ. It speaks of the sort of quiet hope that has sustained them these four decades in a changing retail environment.“
I thought about creating a book for our 40th anniversary, like 40 books in 40 years,” Borger mused, “but I couldn’t come close to telling our story in only 40 titles. There’s been 40 great books every year, and that is what keeps us going — the books and the readers, and the stories of how books transform people, places, and current events.”
