A brick-and-mortar bookstore reopens in La Jolla, and readers flock to it

San Diego book lovers have their long-awaited sequel.

A new Barnes & Noble opened Wednesday in La Jolla, replacing the one that shuttered in 2022 about a mile east, at Costa Verde Center.

“We can’t tell you how thrilled we are to be back here in La Jolla,” the store’s manager, Andrea Lew, said to customers who had lined up to enter, moments before the doors opened.

Shoppers used a similar word: excited. They were excited the neighborhood and San Diego have a new bookstore, excited to line up, excited to shop, excited to read.

“Some people have a neighborhood bar. This will be my neighborhood bookstore,” said Judy Schulman, a retiree and lover of “cozy mysteries.” She lives in La Jolla Colony, just across Interstate 5. Before it shut down almost three years ago, the nearby Bookstar owned by Barnes & Noble had been her go-to. She belonged to its book club and was always popping in to look at books and chat with people.

“We need this here,” Schulman said. In the interim she has bought books from libraries and from Amazon. Now she expects she will come back weekly.

The store, in the La Jolla Village Square shopping center just south of Nobel Drive, has Barnes & Noble’s new bookstore format, said the company’s Southern California area manager, Paul Butler. The nearly 15,000-square-foot space has brightly lit shelves, and its displays showcase books, not just gifts, toys and games.

The store’s front windows are stacked high with books, and inside, the space is uncluttered, with airy, open spaces instead of classic aisles. Occasional reading chairs and tables are scattered among the book-stuffed shelves.

“It’s just very book-forward,” Butler said.

La Jolla has several other bookstores — including Warwick’s and D.G. Wills. The store fills a gap in the chain’s San Diego County market.

This opening is also part of a broader national expansion. “In 2024, Barnes & Noble opened more new bookstores in a single year than it had in the whole decade from 2009 to 2019. The bookseller expects to open over 60 new bookstores in 2025,” the company said in a news release earlier this year.

About an hour after the doors opened, the line to pay wound through the store and to the front door. At the checkout area, dystopian fiction, fancy chocolates and tote bags were available as impulse buys or grab-and-go gifts. One thing shoppers didn’t find: an in-store Starbucks cafe, as is common at other Barnes & Noble stores. The mall already has a Starbucks, a Tous Les Jours bakery and another Starbucks inside the Ralphs grocery store.

As other shoppers crowded around books about justice, morality and manga, Rachel Grossman had a corner almost to herself. She is an architectural writer turned culinary student who sat down to peruse a cookbook with recipes from a local restaurant she’s been intrigued by, Valle.

What brought her in? “The joy of a bookstore,” Grossman said. “Discovery, and finding the things you like.” She lives in University City and loves Warwick’s, the long-standing independent, family-owned bookstore in downtown La Jolla. “But it’s really nice to have a bookstore nearby,” she added.

Toward the back of the store, in the children’s area, young readers waited patiently to meet Pam Fong, the San Diego author of many adorable picture books. Max Amadeus Rocha, 10, came from City Heights with his mother, Karla, and brother Caleb, 12. They had been among the first to line up to enter the store. Rocha brought her sons, whom she home-schools, on a field trip as a way to foster excitement about reading.

Bookstores, she added, are scarce, so she is happy whenever a new one opens.

An even younger reader, Ellis Curtis, almost 3, came with his parents, EJ and Zoie, who live in the neighborhood. They’ve been waiting for the opening for weeks.

“He’s a big reader,” Zoie Curtis said of her son. “It’s one of his biggest passions.” Shopping for books in person “instead of just seeing them online … is just way more fun,” she added.

The parents read him the “Magic Tree House” series “every single night before bed,” EJ Curtis said. “Reading books is just a great part of our lives,” he added. He and his wife love fantasy. He credits the “Harry Potter” series for igniting his love of stories as a child.

For Margi Grant, shopping in person isn’t a clear winner over shopping online. She stopped in from Carmel Valley to inspect travel guides about Japan and Scotland. They were cheaper on Amazon, she observed. But she wondered if a Barnes & Noble membership would bring the price lower than Amazon’s.

Amazon would require waiting for the delivery, but here she would have to wait in a long line to buy them, she considered.

A third wrinkle: She was debating between a paper book and the digital Kindle format book. Digital books let her travel light, but paper books are much easier to flip though when she’s on the move.

“I love the smell of books!” she added, still weighing the pros and cons. “That’s an in-person thing.” She has time to decide. Both cruises are many months away.

Almost an hour after she’d stepped inside, Schulman, the reader of cozy mysteries, was also undecided. She had eyed 12 books. “Only 12,” she said. And she was just getting started.