Mostly Happy Books - Nashville, TN

January 17, 2024

Store Name:   Mostly Happy Books
Location:         Nashville, TN
Visit Time:   Friday Jan 12, 2024 12:00pm
Website:       Mostly Happy Books

Type: Used Books

I made a trip to Nashville for my youngest daughter to visit some high school friends who are married to enlisted soldiers in the Army based in Fort Campbell. My mom went as well; her birthday was that Sunday so we made a weekend out of it to visit Nashville - my first ever trip.

Our first stop was the Grand Ole Opry on the outskirts of town. It was a rainy day so we planned to do indoor activities including a couple of bookstore stops. It just so happened there is a bookstore less than a mile from the Grand Ole Opry, two actually!

Mostly Happy Books isn't what I'd call a traditional bookstore. It's inside an antique mall and marketplace. One of those places where multiple vendors have little booths of various wares but there's only one person tending the cash register at the door for payment to any of the booths. So remember you are looking for Music Valley Antiques, not Mostly Happy Books. We made that mistake on the first lap around the parking lot!

First impressions when I walked in was that it was going to be a dud as I only saw a small non-descript bookshelf with no signage. I thought it was going to be one small stall with a very limited selection of books and nothing local. I kept walking past various booths only to find another small bookshelf, followed by another larger bookshelf, followed by another, and another and while I didn't keep count of how many shelves in total there must have been 10 sets of bookshelves strung around the antique mall. Far from being a dud, it was just a little different! There were several sets of shelves on one end of the store that did contain the sign for Mostly Happy Books. I had to ask the attendant to find out all of those shelves belonged to Mostly Happy Books (except one set for Refuge Books, see the next post on that one.) I'm guessing the large end section was the original store and the other shelves were added to expand when booths became empty.

The first description may sound disorganized but in fact it's fairly organized with certain genres on the different sections of shelves, the shelves just aren't contiguous. There was a good selection of books on the area and area history, some eclectic book series like MAD, Conan, and Dr Who, some golden age mysteries including several Agatha Christie, and a large sci-fi section including lots of Star Wars books. I don't know the total book count but I'd guesstimate a few thousand covering most genres.

As we were checking out and joking with the attendant about antiques and aging I asked about the owner and how long they'd been around. He said the owner started when he was 18 and had been doing this for well over 20 years!