Changing Hands Bookstore celebrates 50 years in metro Phoenix

Gayle Shanks figured she’d run the bookstore for a year.

As a young woman in her 20s, Shanks and some of her fellow teachers at an alternative school would often sit around and talk about plans for the future.

“One of the fantasies that we had was starting a bookstore that would carry books that we loved, we wanted people to read, and one day it just happened,” she says.

That was the mid-1970s, and now, Changing Hands Bookstore will mark its 50th anniversary with celebrations at both locations — 6428 S. McClintock Drive in Tempe and 300 W. Camelback Road in Phoenix — from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Saturday.

As Shanks tells it, the owner of a used bookstore on Mill Avenue, Caveat Emptor, was looking to liquidate inventory and get out of the business. His asking price was $500. Shanks, her husband, Bob Sommer, and original partner Tom Broderson scraped together the money, packed up the books and began looking for a storefront.

On April 1, 1974, Changing Hands opened at 9 E. Fifth St. in Tempe in a former typewriter repair shop with mostly used books, plus one case of new ones selected from the Whole Earth Catalog.

“I grew up reading books; I was a voracious reader,” Shanks says. “Tom did as well, and my other partner, Bob Sommer, was a big reader, too. So we were all into books and we just thought we would do it for a year and see what happened.”

The initial clientele was “mostly hippies,” Shanks says.

“It was a lot of people interested in spirituality and sort of New Age-y kinds of things. Buddhism was a brand-new thing, meditation, yoga — those were all really new things in the ’70s, and people were looking for books about those subjects. And they were also looking for poetry and books on politics. The Vietnam War had just ended, and there were really a lot of people thinking about questioning authority, the history of the United States and how it was playing into their lives. And the environment was really huge in those days, too. We didn’t call it climate change, but we talked about ecology, environmental politics and greenhouse gasses.

“So we thought we were going to have a bookstore that was going to address a lot of the issues that we were facing in the world and as a local community. We were also very interested in ideas about culture and about philosophy and the way that we think about our world and how humans fit into it, and we just thought, what a great thing it would be to have a place that had books about those subjects and people could come in and talk about them," Shanks adds.


The early years weren’t always easy. In the summer months, when foot traffic dried up, the owners feared they’d have to close. But the business grew gradually, and in 1978, after outgrowing the original space, the store moved to 414 S. Mill Ave., where it flourished.

For the next 22 years, Changing Hands on Mill was a hub of Tempe cultural life.

“We started having events there and we just really found that the community was very supportive of our bookstore, and we just never looked back,” Shanks says. “That has been the model that we have used for all these years: Pay strict attention to what people are asking for, listen attentively and then give them what they want. And if you do, they’ll continue to come into the store year after year. And so we really grew, not only the building around the books, but we really built that community around books.

“One of the mayors said, 'Changing Hands is like the living room of the downtown,' and that’s really what it was.”

End of an era

Over the decades, the store expanded into a 5,000-square-foot space that sold books, hosted events and served the community. But Mill Avenue was changing, and not for the better, in Shanks’ opinion.

In earlier years, Mill “was really a family-centered downtown, and it was very unique. It wasn’t a cookie-cutter downtown like so many cities have, with chain stores,” Shanks says.

As nearby Arizona State University grew, developers had a different vision for Mill: fewer local shops and more chain stores. Businesses like Borders bookstore and home decor chain Z Gallerie moved in, changing the flavor of the street.

“It devolved into something else,” Shanks says.

Changing Hands had opened a second location at Guadalupe Road and McClintock Drive in south Tempe in 1998, and in 2000, the Mill Avenue location closed.

“It was really horrible. I was crying all the time,” Shanks says.

New directions

But the store pushed ahead, and around the time that the Mill location closed, a key personnel change occurred.

Cindy Dach had known Changing Hands on Mill as a “sweet, funky, well-curated bookstore,” and got to know the team more in her capacity as an events programmer for Phoenix Public Library. When her time at the library was coming to an end, she reached out to the store and offered to grow its events. From a part-time worker, Dach became general manager and eventually a partner with Shanks and Sommer.

“She’s just such a force of nature,” Shanks says of Dach. “We were doing events before, but nothing on the scale of what we started doing once she was working with us.”

Before the pandemic, Changing Hands was running up to 400 events per year between its two locations, everything from author events to writing workshops to children’s storytimes.

“Events became another arm of Changing Hands, and it was a way for us to introduce the writers who had written all those wonderful books that our customers loved,” Shanks says. “It was an experience you couldn’t get on Amazon. Augusten Burroughs is not going to be on Amazon for you to meet him, or Garrison Keillor, or Madeleine Albright, any of those people. So we really trained our community to start appreciating what it was like to be able to go to a reading and see and talk to and get a signed book from an author.”


Changing Hands flourished in the early 2000s. Gift items helped the store’s revenue and even in the new location, it remained a place for the public to gather.

A friend of Dach’s once told her, “One of my favorite things about Changing Hands is who you bump into when you’re there.”

The store got a huge boost in 2009, when Publishers Weekly awarded it Bookseller of the Year. In 2014, a second location opened at The Newton at Third Avenue and Camelback Road.

The Phoenix store has more of an urban vibe compared to the Tempe location’s suburban feel, Shanks says. The concrete floors are sleek and chic, and the First Draft Book Bar inside allows shoppers to grab a cup of coffee or a glass of wine, sit and read.

Highs and lows

Owning a store is not without its challenges, and Changing Hands has faced its fair share, from floods to recessions to the rise of Amazon and big-box booksellers.

Dach says that the staff handles the bad times the same way they handle the good times: together.

“No matter whether it be a super high or a challenge, it’s continually the way our colleagues sort of say, ‘OK, we’re all in this boat and let’s all grab an oar,'” Dach says.

That philosophy kept the store going through the dark days of COVID-19, when the owners had to find ways to keep the lights on and employees on the payroll.

“It’s a big ship, but we can turn it on a dime,” Shanks says. “We were able to make decisions quickly. Every day was a new adventure, and every single day we were trying to figure out a new way to do something better.”

That meant tactics such as placing jigsaw puzzles in the window so customers could stand outside, call the store with their orders and have them placed in the trunks of their cars, and pivoting to mostly online business.

“All I can say is I have been lucky enough to work with an incredible group of people over the years, from my early partners until now, and it takes a village to make a bookstore and I have been so fortunate,” Shanks says. “I think bookstores just attract a wonderful kind of person who’s smart and resourceful and creative and that’s what it takes. I think that’s why we’ve been around all these years. Because every day is a new day when you have a local indie bookstore. You just never know what you’re going to face and if you have creative people who are working together and love what they’re doing, they figure it out.”

Community impact

But for every hardship, there have been countless moments of joy.

Dach recalls store events with people like former President Barack Obama, a senator at the time, and feminist icon Gloria Steinem, “getting to work side by side with people who shifted and preserved democracy in our country, and I got to be in their world just for a minute,” she says.

She also describes the excitement of the release party for “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” in 2007, when 1,000 people showed up for the celebration.

Shanks thinks about a 2023 event when Indigenous author Tommy Orange visited the Phoenix store and spoke before a crowd mostly composed of Native Americans.

“One woman stood up during the Q&A and said, 'I have never, never been able to meet anybody who has written about my life in the way you wrote about my life,’” Shanks recalls. “That was one of those moments.”

She also thinks about the generations of children who have passed through the doors of Changing Hands.

“When I see children in the store, I know that their worlds are expanding and diversifying," Shanks says. "So the more we made the kids’ sections in both stores play places and happy places for children, the more they want to be there and the more they start their lives reading.

"That was important to me from day one. And those kids have grown up and they now have kids of their own, and they have these special memories of those early days in Changing Hands, and they want those for their kids now," Shanks adds.


Quinn Illgen, who has worked at the Tempe location of Changing Hands for about five years, says the store is sustained by the passion of both the employees and customers.

“I don’t see how else we would have made it without (the community). I book events, and if we didn’t have the people who were so invested in the authors that I brought in, I don’t know how we would keep doing it. And the people I work with, they care so much about books," Illgen says.

"It just feels like it’s everyone’s passion project, so I think that makes a difference," she adds.

TJ Newman has a unique perspective on Changing Hands. She visited the Mill Avenue and Tempe stores as a customer, worked at the Tempe location in 2010 and returned as an author to celebrate the debut of her New York Times bestselling novels “Falling” in 2021 and “Drowning” in 2023.

“Any independent business staying open 50 years is impressive,” she says. “And when you think of everything that has rocked the publishing industry and you think of everything that Changing Hands has been up against, and that they’ve not only survived, but they’ve thrived, and grown and expanded during that, I think it just speaks to what they are and what they do.

“Changing Hands works for the community, for the authors, for the readers and what they do is simple. It’s connection. It’s community. It’s belonging. And I think that’s something that people have always and will always crave and need in their lives.”

For Shanks’ part, she remains grateful for five decades of Changing Hands being an inimitable, irreplaceable part of the Valley.

“I’m shocked. I thought I was going to do this for a year and here it is 50 years later, and we’re still having fun,” she says. “We just feel so blessed that our community has supported us for 50 years. That’s all I can say.”