Tropes & Trifles, Minneapolis’s Romance Bookstore, Thrives on Community

Reading a book is often a solitary affair: one person and their book, whether paper, electronic, or audio. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you have friends to talk about books with, in person or from a distance. Sometimes those friends become more than friends—and no, I’m not alluding to the plot of a romance novel. Sometimes your book club friends become your business partners.

That’s what happened after Lauren Richards and Caitlin O’Neil, the founders of Minneapolis romance bookstore Tropes & Trifles, met through a romance book club in 2019.

Owners Caitlin O’Neil, left, and Lauren Richards, right. Madeleine Vasaly

“We had two or three meetings and then lockdown happened,” Richards told me when we met one morning before the store opened. “So we kept meeting virtually. We actually still meet virtually.” The two were in the club for more than two years before the idea of running a bookshop came up.

“I don’t remember this, but Caitlin tells me that in August of 2022, I made a joke about, ‘Oh, when I quit my job and I start a romance bookstore …’ And then in September 2022, I made the exact same joke.” Richards’s job had been burning her out, to the point that she doesn’t remember making the comment either time. But a few weeks later, O’Neil sent her a message asking how serious she was.

“Well, in my spare time, I [had] been looking up costs and trying to figure out if I was actually going to do this, how much would it cost? Is it feasible?” Richards said. The spreadsheet had numbers, she explained, but they didn’t turn out to be particularly accurate.

O’Neil, who has a background in publishing, immediately offered support—whether that meant making introductions with local people who could help figure out next steps or being a business partner. They got together for what was meant to be a 30-minute coffee meeting but ended up lasting three hours.

The sales floor at Tropes & Trifles. Madeleine Vasaly

Getting Started

They began talking to book reps and then bookstore owners, both in the Twin Cities and elsewhere, who welcomed them into the community. Their first event was a 2023 pop-up in collaboration with Minneapolis’s Big Hill Books on Bookstore Romance Day, a holiday celebrating romance fiction and independent bookstores, where they sold stickers and zines.

“It goes to show how mutually supportive the book community here is,” O’Neil said.

From there, they held their own pop-ups—a folding table and a hundred books every other weekend—and found what would eventually be their long-term home. “We ended up kind of lucking out and ended up in this space—not in this configuration,” O’Neil said, gesturing around at the store with its comfortably wide aisles full of books, white walls, and high ceiling.

When they were ready to launch as a full bookstore, they closed down for four months in early 2024 to reconfigure everything as a permanent space, including moving interior walls and installing shelving.

“We didn’t quite double the footprint, but we were able to get four times more books in here than we had in our pop-up,” Richards said.

Madeleine Vasaly

The store reopened in April 2024, and they’ve been going strong ever since. They’ve recently added author events to their calendar, starting with a RomCom Book Party with KJ Micciche and Elizabeth Davis and continuing with a couple of book launch events in August. The first, for Ellie Palmer’s Four Weekends and a Funeral, sold out and had a waiting list, a huge success. A second, Sam Tschida in conversation with Sarah C. Johns about Tschida’s Errands and Espionage, had good turnout as well.

They’re once again participating in Bookstore Romance Day, this time with seven other local bookstores. The holiday is officially on August 17, but the festivities, spearheaded by Moon Palace Books, are spread out to the entire weekend. They include a grand prize drawing of $20 gift certificates to all of the eight stores, and each store has its own exciting plans; Tropes & Trifles will have additional giveaways, including advance review copies of books and other goodies from publishers.

Building Community

For Richards and O’Neil, participating in events like Bookstore Romance Day and the upcoming Sip & Shop on 3828, a happy hour on August 22 featuring the four women-owned businesses on their block, is part of their commitment to the community. That event will also have giveaways, so mark your calendars for that, too.

The store is celebrating August with Bookstore Romance Day weekend and the Sip & Shop on 3828 event with neighboring businesses. Courtesy Tropes & Trifles

Richards said it’s not uncommon for people to visit the store in groups. Book clubs will stop in, people bring friends, and one Saturday a party bus showed up. (They were apparently doing a crawl of donut shops and bookshops for someone’s birthday, which sounds like an ideal birthday party for a book lover.) She and O’Neil attribute readers’ desire for community partly to the boom in reading that came from the COVID lockdown.

“A lot of people started reading books, and reading romance especially, for the comfort and the sense that in these books, things are going to be okay in the end,” Richards said. Because they couldn’t see their friends in person to discuss the books, a lot of these folks turned to the book-reading portions of TikTok and Instagram, both considered to be important forces in the publishing and marketing world these days. A lot of them discovered romance that way, and now that people are meeting in person again, they are searching for in-person community.

“They come in, and they’re super excited to come and see that there are other people who have read these books and want to talk about them,” Richards said.

One of the many “shelf talkers” throughout the store that recommend books to shoppers. The rainbow heart stickers on the spines highlight books featuring queer romance. Madeleine Vasaly

Another way the bookstore aims to encourage community is with visitor-submitted shelf talkers—the little signs attached to shelves to direct your attention to particular books and why you should read them. Although they’re most often written by staff, and Tropes & Trifles does offer its own, the store also invites customers to write and submit their own.

“We don’t have time to read all the books in the store,” Richards explained. If a customer is excited about a book, it helps everyone.

And the store is always looking to spotlight authors with any degree of Minnesota connection. “Look, if you had a very long layover at the airport, we might count it,” Richards joked. The local authors shelf includes Christina Lauren, Abby Jimenez, and Eloisa James, only one of whom lives here, and it continues to grow. Authors who want their books stocked are invited to reach out through the store website, and the owners say they “make an effort, especially” if a writer has local ties. In addition to novels from the major publishers, they carry both small-press and self-published books.

You’ll find the “MN Connections” books right at the front of the store. Madeleine Vasaly

Romance for Everyone

Despite the stereotypes, all kinds of people read romance—not all of us are middle-aged white women.

“We get a lot of people coming in with their spouses … and maybe they want to do a buddy read,” Richards said. “We get a lot of men, we get a lot of nonbinary folks, we get people across the gender spectrum. That has been very important to us in terms of the curation of the store, because we find it very important to have romances for all of those people who are coming in.”

It’s easier to know you’re welcome when you can see books that reflect your identity. That’s why rainbow stickers on the spines of books throughout the store indicate queer love stories, and for more specific representation, the staff will do their best to find a book for you.

One area where they have heard requests recently is for female main characters over the age of 40—information they’ve passed on to publishers as much as they can.

“The demand is so high,” O’Neil said.

“And it doesn’t count if they’re 200 years old and ageless,” Richards added.

The demand is also high for dark romance, a subgenre that includes more difficult, messy, and taboo themes, including heroes who are also villains—either because of their job (say, mafia hitman) or because of their behavior (stalking, murder). O’Neil and Richards said that after they opened, they quickly realized they had to increase the shelf space allotted to dark romance.

“We knew it would be popular. We didn’t know the extent,” O’Neil said. They had to switch the dark romance and historical sections just to keep stock on the shelves.

Staff member Katrina offers an explanation for the appeal of dark romance: “It’s a really safe way for people to feel like ‘This is edgy, this is something I’ve always been curious about, but nobody wants to talk about it with me.’ And then you read dark romance and you’re like, oh, people are talking about this, and you find your people.” Once again, it’s about community.

They were roommates! Madeleine Vasaly

In addition to all the “true” romance books in the store, there is a shelf labeled “Not Quite Romance,” which holds books the owners want to sell but that don’t meet the romance novel criteria of a primary romantic story and a guaranteed happy ending. These include books by authors who made their name in romance but also write in other genres, including Alyssa Cole, KJ Charles, and Chuck Tingle. The books “usually do have some part of a romantic element,” Richards explained, “but it’s kind of a mishmash.”

If someone comes in asking for something that they simply don’t carry, they are happy to point someone to a different bookstore, like DreamHaven Books just up the street. “We love to send people up there,” O’Neil said.

At the end of the day, they love all kinds of books and all kinds of readers. “We aim to be here for romance readers of all levels of experience, and also all levels of spice,” Richards said. Brand-new readers are among their favorites.

“They’ll come in and ask us for recommendations about where to start. We always love to start by asking them, ‘What do you usually love to read? What was the last book that you read and loved?’ And then we’ll try to find a romance that’s sort of adjacent to that,” O’Neil said. Both owners and staff are always happy to give recommendations for anyone.

“That’s honestly our favorite thing,” Richards said.

“It literally makes our day,” O’Neil added.

The store shares a building with Tare Market and is just across the street from Northern Smokehouse. Madeleine Vasaly

Tropes & Trifles is located at 2709 East 38th Street in Minneapolis’s Standish neighborhood. The store is participating in Bookstore Romance Day weekend August 16–18 and Sip & Shop on 3828 on August 22, 2024. Find other event listings, online shopping, and recommendations at TropesAndTrifles.com.