Third-year University of Virginia students Max Fleisher, 20, Miles Miskill, 21, and fourth-year student Molly Canipe, 21, had been patronizing Heartwood Books, a cozy used bookstore on 5 Elliewood Ave. in Charlottesville, since their first years at UVA.
Back then, they had no idea that in just a few years — while still undergrads — they would be running the bookstore under a new name: Ginkgo Bookshop.
The bookstore is just a block away from the Corner, a seven-block collection of bars, restaurants and other businesses across the street from the University of Virginia’s central grounds.
“I was a first-year, and I was exploring the Corner, and I was going into every place that looked like a cool spot,” Miskill told Charlottesville Tomorrow. He stumbled upon Heartwood, where he found and purchased a collection of short stories by Ernest Hemingway for around $3.
“And I was like, wow, this is crazy how cheap it is to buy books here,” he said. But what kept him coming back was not just the low prices. It was also the feel of the place, which he described as less commercialized than other businesses.
“No one’s really, like, begging you to buy a book,” he said. “It’s more like going there for a conversation. You kind of have to search for something that will find you.”
Like Miskill, Canipe was also initially drawn in by the affordable prices, but kept coming back to Heartwood for the space itself.
“It grew, for me, into this space that’s really representative of all of the idiosyncrasies of Charlottesville and the people that live here,” she said. “It’s a whole world in there.”
The store’s inventory includes academic history tomes and leather-bound dust-covered classics, along with cookbooks and books about how to use grass to weave baskets, she added. “And then the fiction section has everything from Stephen King to, like, James Patrick. I got kind of addicted to combing through it and seeing what was new and what had changed since I’d been there last.”
Despite its dedicated base of customers from the university and beyond, Heartwood was on its way out. The bookstore’s owner, Paul Collinge, opened the store in 1975 and ran it for decades, but planned to close it at the end of 2025 after a 50-year legacy due to declining sales.
“I’m happy that it’s continuing,” Collinge told Charlottesville Tomorrow. “The alternative was for me to shut down, call some wholesale, used-book person and have them haul all the books away.”
So when Fleisher told Miskill and Canipe that he was interested in taking over the bookstore as a student-run venture — with the goal of making it a point of connection between the university and the community — they jumped at the chance to keep the neighborhood gem alive while bringing new meaning to its half-century legacy.
The new owners also plan to keep Heartwood affordable for students and residents alike.
“We’re absolutely angling to continue being the cheapest used bookshop in town,” Fleisher told Charlottesville Tomorrow. “Our average book is around six bucks, and our goal is to keep the vast majority of our books under the cost of lunch.”
Collinge, meanwhile, will still run a small antiquarian bookstore, which will include a collection of used and rare books, next door at 7 Elliewood Ave. That store will continue to bear the Heartwood name, while the name of the main book store at 5 Elliewood Ave. was changed to Ginkgo Books. This was done to avoid confusion between the two bookstores, and to honor one of Fleisher’s professors, David Edmunds, who has a tradition of handing out a green and yellow leaf from ginkgo trees to his students at graduation to acknowledge the passing of time throughout their academic careers. Edmunds, a global studies professor, specializes in environmental issues that intersect with culture, social relations, politics and community development, according to UVA’s website.
A point of connection between students and the community
While the bookstore has called Charlottesville home for half a century, it never fully felt like it was part of the city, Collinge told Charlottesville Tomorrow.
“There’re issues with being by the Corner, which is that it’s so dominated by students and the university,” he said. “It’s almost bizarrely separate from the city. It’s just a different world.”
Fleisher, who worked at the bookstore for eight months before he took over from Collinge, hopes to change that.
“I put together a team of undergrads, one of whom is Miles Miskill and another is Molly Canipe, and we worked with our friends and with people in town to figure out why Heartwood was an important place for so long and how it would look different if it were to be student-run,” he told Charlottesville Tomorrow. Another UVA undergrad, Margot Ross, is one of the store’s student workers.
“And we came to the realization that it needed to be the same caliber of used bookstore as before, but we also wanted to host events and programming for locals and support the community around us, while having a real stake in the community,” Fleisher said.
As part of their efforts to become more involved in the community, Fleisher plans to turn the bookstore — which is about 1,500 square feet — into a nonprofit that will host regular free events and donate the proceeds of fundraisers to the library, local literary organizations and other groups in Charlottesville.
To kick off their community programming, the students hosted a Jan. 23 live jazz night at Ginkgo. It was free to all community members, and drew about 120 students and residents.
“We’ll probably end up doing something like that once a month,” Fleisher said, adding that the team — which operated on razor-thin margins for the first few weeks — is “currently making enough to keep the events free and use them as opportunities to support causes we care about.”
They’ve also hosted two charity shows so far, donating the proceeds to the Legal Aid Justice Center and WXTJ, UVA’s student radio station.
Fleisher hopes the bookstore can function as a free “third space” for community members as well, where local residents and students alike can gather, connect and relax without having to spend any money.
“We want to open up the doors to things like book clubs and book readings from new authors and to reading groups that make us better connected with both the university and with Charlottesville,” Fleisher told Charlottesville Tomorrow. “So it’s not a space that’s limited to just faculty and students. If people in town want to host a book club there, especially since we’re next to a wine shop, that’s something that we want to be able to do.”
Despite his love for the used bookstore, Fleisher’s long-term goal is to pass it on to a different group of students to run every few years. He’s also establishing a scholarship fund to send one or two undergrads a year to a week-long bookselling seminar in Minnesota that offers specialized educational programs and training for booksellers. It’s the same seminar Fleisher attended when he first spoke to Collinge about taking over the bookstore.
“We love the bookstore, and we will be here and working at it as long as we’re in Charlottesville, but I think for it to be most sustainable and most responsive to community needs, the goal is to have it passed on to other young people to run it,” he said. “And so we are already seeking out a group of students and community members that will run the bookstore after we have left, and that way it’s a continuous cycle of people learning how to run the bookstore as a business and also learning the value of it as a community space.”
Fleisher, Canipe, Miskill and Collinge also hope that the community events at the bookstore will help reconnect students and locals alike with a love of books and reading.
“There’s a lot of concern amongst older people and even younger people about all of these trends in literacy, like the idea that people don’t read anymore, that they don’t care about physical books,” Canipe told Charlottesville Tomorrow. “And I want the bookstore to stand as testimony to the idea that in times of trouble people still do look toward worlds — whether they’re fictional or nonfictional — that help us understand our own better.
“We also hope that Ginkgo does resist the urge to fade into the student population, and that it’s always led by students that really think critically about how the university is positioned within Charlottesville, what the relationship between students and residents is, and what books can do to bridge that gap and to create a community space.”
