Below is the text of the remarks I made at this morning’s grand opening of the Bookmarks bookstore and community gathering space. Whether you live in Winston-Salem or elsewhere, be sure to stop by and visit this amazing space and check out the great literary events happening there all year round.

My name is Charlie Lovett and I am the president of the board of directors of Bookmarks, Winston-Salem’s literary non-profit. On behalf of the board, our staff, and our volunteers, I’d like to welcome you to the grand opening of Bookmarks’ new home. The building you’re about to experience is so much more than a bookstore. This is a gathering space to form community around the literary arts.

With our custom-designed event space and the ability to attract authors on tour we will double our number of events and our outreach, including our authors in schools program and our soon to be popular semi-weekly story-time. Most bookstores are designed to be retail spaces and the area for author events is, at best, an afterthought. But let me tell you, when authors see our event set up at Bookmarks they are going to be gob-smacked. Thanks to our architect, Winston-Salem native Glenn Fulk and our builders LMI, we have one of the best author presentations areas I’ve seen, and I’ve seen a lot of them. Bookmarks already has a reputation in the industry for hosting great author events, and that reputation is about to get a whole lot better.

When I joined the board of Bookmarks a little over four years ago, we had two part-time employees and operated out of Ginger Hendricks’ basement. Just over a year ago, the board of directors sat in my living room debating whether or not we wanted to take the step of creating this new space—a space where people could buy and read and talk about and be inspired by books. Our long-range plan, developed by Board President Emeritus Philip Mulder, called for such a place, but it seemed an awfully big leap. We decided to take the first step of forming an exploratory committee, and we never looked back. Thanks to a tremendous outflow of support from individuals, corporations, and foundations, many of whom are listed on our donor wall, we were able to reach this day. But last April, I don’t think any of us dared to dream we could do something on this scale.

Bookmarks is always growing and looking for new ways to reach our entire community and spread the joy of books and reading. That will continue to happen. We’re still receiving orders from publishers, so every day we will have more books on the shelves. We’re scheduling more events, and will be sharing books through audio and e-book platforms. So enjoy today, but come back often to see what happens next.

None of what you are about to see could have happened without the support, care, and planning of the board of directors and the incredible energy, professionalism, vision, and hard work of our full time staff Ginger Hendricks, Jamie Southern, and Beth Seufer Buss.

A few months ago, Ginger and I went to fundraising seminar. One of our exercises was to write down what we would want our organization to accomplish if money were no object. I said I wanted to see Winston-Salem become a city of books, a must-visit destination for the book tourist (and yes, that is a thing).

We live in a community that can take dreams and turn them into reality. Today we have visitors from Asheville, Durham, Atlanta, New York, Alabama, Louisiana, and Davidson, and those are just the ones I know about. So if you’re lucky enough to call Winston-Salem home, please welcome our visitors. It’s something we’ll be doing every day at Bookmarks.

I was speaking to Emily Wilson recently, and she called Bookmarks and its new space “The most transformative thing to happen to Winston-Salem since the School of the Arts.” It’s true that today, July 8, 2017, in this City of the Arts, the literary arts take their rightful place beside the performing and visual arts.

It is perhaps appropriate that Emily, a great Winston-Salem writer, should mention the School of the Arts, because it was another great Winston-Salem writer, John Ehle, who was one of the moving forces behind that institution. In fact, today we stand on the shoulders of not just Emily and John and Penny Niven and Maya Angelou, but of all the writers and readers who have called this city home. And from that height we are able to shout to the skies that as of today, Winston-Salem is a book destination and it is a city of the literary arts.