Sydney Ivey thinks romance books get a bad rap.
“I've been reading romance since I was young and I loved it, but it truly was a shameful thing,” she said. “It was like, ‘Don't talk about it. That's what you read on your Kindle. You don't actually buy a physical copy of it. No one wants to see those covers.’”
Ivey, a former kindergarten teacher, is now making it her business – literally – to turn around public perception of the steamy genre.
On Saturday, Ivey officially opens the doors to Spicy Librarian, a new romance bookstore in the RiNo Arts District in Five Points. Its arrival is part of a genre resurgence and a growing trend among bookstores.
Romance is more than just smut — and it's a big business
Yes, the romance genre is well known for the classics. You might think of Jane Austen’s gentlemen protagonists, or maybe the 20th century’s bodice rippers, with shirtless, long-haired men probably named Fabio on the cover. Or, more recent bestsellers like "Fifty Shades of Grey.”
But the genre is experiencing a resurgence, Ivey said. Even as other books slump or stay steady, romance is surging — the genre saw a 52 percent increase in sales from 2021 to 2022, according to Publisher’s Weekly.
That’s due in part to the popularity of BookTok and other online reading communities, as well as the versatility of the genre.
New entries to the genre have received critical acclaim from critics and readers alike. “The Song of Achilles,” a retelling of the Trojan War that follows the romance between Patroclus and Achilles, won the United Kingdom’s Orange Prize for Fiction in 2012. “Fourth Wing,” a high fantasy novel with deep worldbuilding, led book sales charts for months. Sally Rooney’s “Normal People” was adapted into the widely popular Hulu miniseries starring Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar-Jones.
After burning out of teaching, Ivey said she saw an opportunity to build a space for the revived genre.
“People think of romance as super raunchy, but also, 50 percent of romance doesn't have any explicit scenes in it,” she said. “It's really not as raunchy as you think, and people aren't just reading it only for the sex. It is good storytelling and it is good writing.”
Building a community space
Ivey sees genre-focused bookstores as the path forward for a beleaguered industry tired of competing with big box bookstores like Barnes & Noble, which recently acquired Denver’s Tattered Cover.
Instead, she expects to see more independent businesses like Petals & Pages, a queer feminist bookstore in the Santa Fe Arts District, or Idlewild Books, a New York bookstore that mainly sells travel guides.
Spicy Librarian itself is joining a growing club of romance bookstores nationwide, like San Diego’s Meet Cute and The Ripped Bodice, which splits the coasts with shops in Brooklyn and Los Angeles.
“It makes sure that you're bringing also the online community that people have cultivated and created into a very real space,” Ivey said.
Ivey has set up comfortable couches and reading nooks around the bookstore to help foster community. She doesn’t want customers to walk in just to buy a book — she wants them to meet each other and bond over their shared love of romance novels.
“It is a place that people can come and hang out, that people can come and bring their book club here and as well as being very sex-positive, female-forward,” she said.
Ivey is fighting another stigma at her store
In the back of the store, a bookshelf hides a secret door labeled “The Vault” It’s for adult eyes only.
Behind the door lies a trove of “intimate wellness products” — aka; sex toys.
“There's a lot of bookstores with coffee shops in them. Going towards the intimate wellness side of things, I thought it just opened a lot more fun door,” Ivey said.
Ivey said two things can be true — romance novels aren’t all about sex, and sex positivity should be celebrated.
“I also think that romance in general, because it's becoming more normalized and more mainstream, it's bringing out conversations that we don't normally have,” Ivey said. “Especially as women, it was always, ‘You don't talk about your sex life, you don't talk about women's pleasure or that's not a right that you get.’”
Ivey isn’t keen on advertising the Spicy Librarian as a hybrid bookstore and sex shop. Since it’s behind closed doors, people won’t feel pressured to have that as part of their shopping experience.
“I am sure there will be people that walk in here that don't even realize that it exists, but if you are wanting to experience something new or go and see something, it's there for you,” she said.
Spicy Librarian opens its doors for the first time this Saturday, Jan. 18. It will be open daily from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. at 3040 Blake St., #110, Denver.
