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Noëlle Santos opened The Lit. Bar to bring books to her neighborhood. Now her line of customers spans the country.
When Bronx resident and bookstagrammer Tasha Delvalle walked into The Lit. Bar in April 2019, she was surprised to see Esmeralda Santiago’s 1993 memoir, When I Was Puerto Rican, front and center. “It was the first time that I actually walked into a bookstore and I felt seen. It felt like home,” Delvalle says of the only independent bookstore in the New York borough. “I saw myself in the books on display.”
Less than a year later, The Lit. Bar’s founder, Noëlle Santos, had to temporarily close her store due to the Covid-19 crisis. Yet Santos’ entrepreneurial journey in a book desert has attracted not just vocal locals like Delvalle but also celebrities, including Martha Stewart and Usher, who have been imploring their followers to support black-owned businesses.
Across the country, sales of books pertaining to race have surged over the past few weeks. Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, Ijeoma Oluo’s So You Want to Talk About Race, and How to be Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi have all climbed the bestseller lists of independent bookstores’ existential threat—Amazon.
As the country grapples with major economic, racial and health crises, Santos is fighting to keep her fledgling store alive, believing in the power of books to move people forward. “Books will educate us, they will help to heal us,” she says. “And bookstores in particular give us the hub, the physical location, to have these conversations so that it doesn’t just live within us.”
“I am a woman, a millennial, a Puerto Rican, I’m African American,” Santos says. “I can’t pinpoint which part of my identity holds me back.”
Born and raised in South Bronx, Santos, who identifies as Afro-Latina, has spent most of her life in the borough, which is home to some 1.4 million people, including many that share her heritage. More than 40% of the population in the Bronx is black while over 55% identify as Hispanic or Latino.
When she was 16, Santos started living on her own, and later attended the Bronx-based Lehman College for both her bachelor’s degree in accounting and master’s degree in human resources management. While she was able to graduate from college, a milestone for only 20% of the Bronx population, she lost friends to street violence or police brutality. “I am a woman, I am a millennial, a Puerto Rican, I’m African American. I live in the poorest congressional district in the United States,” the 33-year-old entrepreneur says. “I can’t pinpoint which part of my identity holds me back. I try not to focus on that, but I know that I have to run 10 times faster than anyone else to get things done.”
Nearly 40% of the residents in the South Bronx live in poverty, which is almost quadruple the national rate. Growing up in an environment where the odds were stacked against her, Santos says she used to equate success with how far she would be able to go beyond her neighborhood. But life had a plot twist in store for her.
In 2014, Santos was a human resources director at an IT company in downtown Manhattan when she heard that the last bookstore in the Bronx, a Barnes & Noble in Co-op City, would close its doors. The news sparked a fire in her. She immediately signed a petition to keep the location open but when it failed, she took the matter into her own hands.
Covered: Though Santos can’t welcome customers in The Lit. Bar yet, she has grown her business online.
James Estrin
Santos had never been to an independent bookstore at that point in her life, but she soon devised a plan to open one. She took a course offered by the American Booksellers Association on how to launch a bookstore. She says she didn’t leave the course with the answers but at least she had the right questions. In order to build on what she had taught herself, she reached out to independent bookstore owners such as Rebecca Fitting and Jessica Stockton Bagnulo, the team behind Brooklyn’s Greenlight Bookstore, which has annual sales over $5 million. “Sometimes we’ll meet with someone and we’ll be like ‘Oh, you really don’t know what you’re getting into.’” Stockton Bagnulo recalls. “Noëlle already knew what she was talking about and she wanted to delve into specifics and best practices.”
Two years later, Santos signed up for New York Public Library’s annual 10-month long business plan competition and she won a prize for her rather unique proposal: A bookstore that is also a bar. (Thus, the word “Lit” which stands for literary as well as “poppin’” and “drunk,” Santos explains.) The prize money was not nearly enough to start her store, however, so Santos thought of creative ways to fund it, and eventually turned to her community for help.
On Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 2017, Santos took to Indiegogo and started a fundraiser named “Let’s Bring A Goddamn Bookstore To The Bronx”. (Some were upset with the title, she laughs, but she wanted customers to know “the personality they would be getting” when they visited it.) In little over a month, Santos raised more than $150,000. “Bookstores are a wealth of knowledge and that’s not what you see in communities throughout the Bronx,” says Marva Allen who co-owned the nation’s largest black-owned independent bookstore, Hue-Man, in Harlem. She also helped Santos raise more funds. “You see McDonalds, Burger King, and Taco Bell; what [corporations] think is important to the Bronx.” The support for Santos’ venture showed that the Bronx also had a real appetite for books.
The Lit. Bar opened in April 2019, and in 8 months, its sales exceeded Santos’ 12-month projection of $300,000. But citywide restrictions to curb the spread of coronavirus put a halt to brick-and-mortar retail, erasing local businesses that couldn’t afford New York’s exorbitant rent and salaries. Santos’ landlord told her not to worry about eviction when the city’s lockdown began, but she still had to furlough her five employees, all black women.
“New York City is the [Covid-19] epicenter of this country,” Santos says, “and the Bronx is the epicenter of the epicenter. And that’s the case for everything,” including not just books, but also education, food, and health care. Santos received a $17,777 PPP loan, which she says she was able to get through her connections at Chase bank, and will put some of it to use towards her rent and later on towards payroll expenses when she can reopen.
Until then, Santos planned on treading water by reaching out to companies and schools to attract new customers. She also goes into the store every day to send out packages, which include gift boxes for recent graduates or Teacher Appreciation Day. And while The Lit. Bar can technically sell liquor, which is deemed essential by New York City, customers cannot come in to buy books, which used to make up about 80% of her sales.
Then the killing of George Floyd and the ensuing protests provided a bittersweet boon for her business. In the past two weeks, Santos says she has sold $850,000 worth of books, mostly on race. Customers can also buy books from The Lit. Bar on Bookshop.org, including those on her now viral booklist “Dear White People.” Up until June, the most popular book sold was Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, followed by a personal favorite of Santos’, P. E. Moskowitz’s 2017 study of gentrification, How to Kill a City. Now the top two titles are White Fragility and How to be Antiracist.
“Black people, we were traumatized before George Floyd,” Santos adds. “We all know people like uncles, cousins, fathers, and brothers. We’ve seen that same force being put on our family members within an inch of their lives. We don’t hear those stories because they haven’t passed away.” The Lit. Bar also received a large order from Black Inclusion Group, an employee resource group at LinkedIn, for The Unapologetic Guide to Black Mental Health by psychologist Rheeda Walker. The purchase came shortly after the murder of Ahmaud Arbery by two white men made the national headlines in May—74 days after the incident.
“I’m really interested in how this [movement] plays out in long term, not just in terms of people’s voices and speaking up but what this looks like in boardrooms, what this looks like in terms of opportunity, what this looks like in terms of funding,” says Santos who anticipates The Lit. Bar will reopen by early July. “Don’t just send me a tweet. Send me a picture of your executive team and I want to see color on it. That’s what I’m looking for.”