Third Place Books

After decades in Seattle, I realized I had never been to the suburban “city” of Lake Forest Park. All I knew about it was that it had the famous Third Place Books bookstore. The name references a theory that people need a place to live, a place to work, and a third place to gather and form a community. As far as I can tell, the bookstore is the only third place in that small bedroom community. So one day we drove out there, and it was everything we could have hoped for. But it was still all the way out in LFP. Later, they opened a new store in Ravenna, a neighborhood that I could walk to. (I would never walk to the bookstore, though, because books are heavy and I’d never make it home.) We were thrilled, and it has since become our favorite bookstore. This photo is our haul from our first visit to the Third Place in Ravenna.