Amazing Books and Records never wanted to leave Downtown.
It wasn’t part of the businesses’ plan, but its old store on Liberty Avenue being sold in 2024 somewhat forced the bookstore’s hand into leaving.
But after a chance at opening a pop-up store in One Oxford Centre, which lasted from November to late December last year, Eric Ackland, the owner of Amazing Books and Records, decided he wanted to stay.
And just shy of one month of being in what was once the pop-up space, Ackland said things have been great.
According to Levi, an employee at the bookstore who declined to provide his surname, the city has been throwing support at the bookstore.
He said the Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership helped get them into the Oxford Centre in the first place and helped with leasing and rent abatements. Additionally, Ackland closed his store in Shadyside to move back Downtown, since he never stopped believing in the area and “believed it was time for a change.”
Levi said Ackland never wanted to leave Downtown, where the original Amazing Books and Records store started on Liberty Avenue. Levi has worked with the bookstore since 2022, so he remembers what the space was like and knew the return to Downtown was right.
Plus, Levi said profit margins at the Downtown pop-up store were much larger than expected, so it would’ve been a “missed opportunity” to not stay. And stay they did, especially because people have been clamoring for a bookstore to return to Downtown, according to Ackland.
While the store is open, some work still needs to be done. Levi said there are thousands of books to sort through still, and ideas on what to do with the rest of the space, but he said it’s up in the air. As far as storage, the bookstore has a “huge mess of books” to be sorted in a backroom space, along with upstairs space for even more books and listicles.
Amazing Books and Records has moved around a lot in its existence.
While the Liberty Avenue store was a consistent location until 2024, a location in Squirrel Hill opened in 2014 on Murray Avenue and moved to Forbes Avenue in 2021 and one in Shadyside opened in 2024 before it closed this year.
Originally, Amazing Books and Records was once Awesome Books. The original bookstore business mostly operated out of a location on Penn Avenue in Garfield, which was a clay art studio by artist Laura Jean McLaughlin before briefly becoming Awesome Books.
That business opened up a shop Downtown in 2012 as part of the PDP’s Project Pop-Up, but the owners wanted to sell it barely a year later.
Ackland said he only ventured into the store because the DMV was closed, where after he said he wanted to own a bookstore it was offered to him.
However, Ackland did not buy the rights to the name, so he decided to call it Amazing Books instead. The store on Penn Avenue turned back into the Clay Penn until 2024, when McLaughlin moved her studio out of the building.
Now that Amazing Books is back Downtown, Levi said he hopes students from nearby universities can appreciate the store’s existence and stop in.
Before the bookstore decided to stay beyond just a pop-up store, the Downtown Neighbors Alliance had planned to open their own bookstore on Liberty Avenue. Those plans have since been scrapped.
The PDP did not respond to a request for comment.
