Introducing the four bookstore owners participating in a keynote presentation on Black bookselling at Winter Institute 2025 in Denver, Donya Craddock, co-owner of Dock Bookshop in Fort Worth, Tex., introduced panelist Janet Webster Jones by proclaiming, “All hail to the queen, Ms. Janet.” Jones, widely admired in the bookselling world, is the owner with her daughter, Alyson Jones Turner, of Source Booksellers in Detroit—which is PW’s Bookstore of The Year.
In her letter nominating Source for the award, Sandra Law, a sales rep at Abraham Associates, wrote that while she works with many amazing independent bookstores across the Midwest, “few encompass the spirit of bookselling and community engagement as powerfully as Source Booksellers.” Law added that Jones “has dedicated her life to championing literacy, education, and history, ensuring that readers have access to books that inspire, inform, and challenge perspectives.”
She is not alone in her admiration. Bestselling author Hanif Abdurraqib, who brings Jones a bouquet of flowers every time he stops by Source, describes the bookstore as “a beacon of warmth, a true definition of a community-centered bookstore, one that cares deeply about the community it’s in, the readers it serves, and the writers who come to it.”
When telling Source’s origin story, Jones says she operated a pop-up bookstore before the business model came into prominence. A public school educator in Detroit at the time, Jones began selling books about African and African American history in 1989 from a table she would set up at church bazaars, fairs, and other community events. “We just went where we knew the people would be,” she told PW in 2021. “There would be people selling jewelry, oils, clothing. I turned out to be the book lady.”
After retiring as an educator in 2002, Jones and three other Black women entrepreneurs formed the Spiral Collective, which sold various products for more than a decade in a shared space across the street from Source’s current location in the Midtown district. Source became a standalone business in 2013 in an 800-sq.-ft. space that was expanded during the pandemic to 1,400 sq. ft.
The store employs seven people and carries primarily nonfiction titles, with an emphasis on history, culture, health, metaphysics, spirituality, and literature by and about women. Source also stocks a large selection of books about Detroit because, Jones explains, "I see myself as a bookseller that is representing titles that relate to the people who are in Detroit, who come to Detroit, who have been in Detroit, and who have moved through Detroit.”
Jones attributes much of her store’s longevity to its status as a niche shop that can “go deep” in its inventory and carry books that her customers might not otherwise see at more general bookstores. “We don’t try to do everything, to be everything,” Jones says. “We’ve just tried to serve the community; service is one of our main features.”
Another secret to the store’s success, Jones says, is that she and her staff recognize that “literacy takes many forms” and that Source exists to “serve people in their literary life and the journey that they are on,” whether they are reading books in paper or digital formats or listening to audiobooks. “Even if they’re reading little, tiny books, or they’re reading on their computer,” she says. “All of that. I point out to people that we all have a literary life. Everybody reads.”
