Chamblin Bookmine: A Local Jacksonville Treasure

Chamblin Bookmine stands along Roosevelt Boulevard, and from the looks of it, it might have only been a warehouse. Walking through the front door is a different story. The front desk pales in comparison to the floor to ceiling shelves surrounding it in every direction. The shelves seem to go for miles, the end of each row getting farther and farther away. The shelves meet in jagged corners. They meet in side rooms. They meet in corridors. Books line each wall creating a masterpiece of color on every surface. In smaller wall spaces, pictures line the plaster. The walls are void of blank space.

Chairs rest at the end of each aisle for readers to stop and browse their favorite stories. Novels are piled along the floor next to the overflowing sections they belong to. Books are shoved into every empty space on the shelves – upright, sideways, diagonal, any way they will fit. Some of the shelves even have makeshift extensions built with older wood that looks capable of toppling over any second with the weight of the stories. The sounds of the employees explaining the sections are drowned out by the silence of the back of the store. Corridors open up to more shelves creating a maze of color and curiosity. People peruse each shelf with bright eyes and smiles on their faces. The rooms continue to get longer and more chaotic with some level of organization. Bright colored notes give a sense of location, indicating the genre of each row and signs pointing back to the front desk. People sometimes have to search for the exit as they get lost in the depths of the Bookmine.

Chamblin Bookmine first opened in 1976 in a small rental space on Herschel Street. At the time, Jacksonville was not the booming city it is today, just getting recognition for being a new successful city. With only occasional part-time employees and a dream, Ron Chamblin built Chamblin Bookmine from the bottom up. Chamblin started the business selling books out of a small house with his friend and saw the impact it had on readers. Consistently growing, Chamblin now owns two locations in downtown Jacksonville. These locations house thousands of well-read, used, and new books. Over the years, it has become a cultural center for Jacksonville residents. The shelves of Chamblin Bookmine are known worldwide and have been highlighted in several reports on bookstores in the southeast.

RELATED: Downtown History - Downtown Jacksonville

Sitting 15 minutes away in the heart of the city is Chamblin’s second retail location. From the outside, no one would even know it was there. Walking down the streets of downtown Jacksonville, a tiny overhead sign reads “Books and Coffee.” A local secret, Chamblin’s Uptown Café remains a center for art and literature. Stepping inside, it feels as though the city falls away and peace and quiet fill the air.

The sounds of coffee machines and people flipping pages echoes in the building. People come to the café to relax and work on assignments for school or projects for their jobs. The aroma of coffee and toasted bagels emanates from behind the counter into the endless lines of bookshelves. Walking further back into the maze of books piled from floor to ceiling, the smell starts to fade into the musty scent of old books and well-read pages. The sight of all the shelves is almost overwhelming with less than an arm's length between them. The shelves sag under the weight of novels and short stories alike. The antique copies carry a dulling beauty about them with the gold lettering fading with the bright colors of the spines. The rest of the books are strewn along the shelves in organized chaos. Each row is perfectly sectioned into genre. The colorful sticky notes dictating each genre stand out along the dull beige of the wooden shelves. Biographies crowd the corner of the maze. Young adult fiction encompasses two rows. The second floor remains a lost treasure for curious readers. Up above the noise of the café, it is silent. The floor creaks with every step showing the building’s age.

Chamblin Bookmine creates a safe haven for readers, old and young, to learn about their favorite topics and indulge in feeding their creativity. Abby McCall, a manager at the Bookmine location, is one of those readers. Abby became familiar with the store at a very young age, visiting frequently with her grandmother. She was accustomed to the looming shelves and decided that she wanted to run her own bookstore one day. Chamblin Bookmine became a starting point for Abby to fulfill her childhood dream.

“Whenever I would go visit her house, she would come here to look for her quilting books when I was a kid and she would plop me down in the kids’ section while she would go look for them,” Abby said.

So many people like Abby visit the Chamblin stores every day. Many of those people work at both locations. Johnny Masiulewicz, a current sales associate for Chamblin Bookmine, is a friend of Chamblin’s and a huge proponent of art and literature in the city. He seems anxious standing at the front, taking care of the customers, but he is very passionate about each purchase. Literature has been a constant in Johnny’s life, and he made it his career. When not manning the front desk of the bookstore, Johnny owns Happy Tapir, a publishing company that works directly with Jacksonville artists and authors to bolster support for local creators. Johnny believes that Chamblin Bookmine has become a beacon for Jacksonville residents as one of the oldest businesses in the city.

“I think that being a 50-year-old, successful, independent business obviously adds to the flavor of the city in both neighborhoods. It’s a jewel in the chamber of commerce and the history of the city for the past half-century,” Johnny said.

Chamblin Bookmine and the Uptown Café hold a special place in people’s hearts and continue to become more successful. Bigger companies have come into the picture with online shopping and delivery, but Chamblin Bookmine has held strong as the technology of the day keeps growing. Abby and Johnny said that the stores don’t have any sort of logging systems of databases, but they are just as successful as ever. In its 46th year in business, Chamblin Bookmine has stuck with the traditional way of searching for books: mining for them in the maze of shelves.

“That’s part of the reason they call it the Bookmine. You have to go digging for stuff. Do we know everything that’s in here? No. But the system works and we’re not going to change it,” Johnny said.

The stores have been through a lot in the last 50 years, and they are only getting more successful. As one of the most popular bookstores in the southeast, Chamblin Bookmine is not going anywhere. In fact, the future holds an interesting turn. Abby McCall said that there have been discussions about future ownership of the store. She may finally live her dream of owning a bookstore.

“I’m hoping to eventually be one of the owners of this place. Mr. Chamblin has talked a lot about doing employee ownership, which would be cool because it would be split between all of the employees here,” Abby said.

On a normal Saturday afternoon people browse the stores from all over Jacksonville. One person stops in front of the young adult fiction novels, looking over all the titles from her youth. From Harry Potter to the Heroes of Olympus novels, she brushes her fingers over the spines thinking about reading them for the first time. She meanders down the aisle branching into other genres, curious about what to read next. After a few moments, she wanders to the front of the store with books in hand to purchase. This is a daily routine for some, and a once in a blue moon activity for others. Chamblin Bookmine remains a cultural hub for Jacksonville literature.