EL PASO, Texas (KTSM) — With a facade of a normal house, many people drive by Brave Books.
The locally owned bookstore resides in Central El Paso, right behind the busy Montana Ave. on 1307 Arizona Ave.
Jud Burgess owns Brave Books with his wife Laurie and has been open for business for over five years. The business is open Friday to Wednesday from 12 p.m. to 5 p.m., except on Saturday, they are open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
When you walk to the front door of Brave Books, on top of the door is the word “Brave” and when you walk in to the first room of the store, the words “Be Brave” stand out near the ceiling.
From top to bottom, the entirety of the building is covered in books and trinkets. Burgess said it’s only half of his collection.
“We probably have around 7,000 books in here and then in storage, I have another easy 7,000. I’m taking all of that out of storage. It’s a lot of good stuff. I’m brining in good stuff that I just don’t have room for,” Burgess said.
Burgess has a background in graphic design, and he opened his design business in 1988. That was how he got into collecting books.
“I’m a graphic designer and that’s what I’ve done all my life. That’s kind of how I caught my teeth on book collecting. I acquired a huge collection of graphic design, photography and creative books,” Burgess said.
In times of smartphones, Burgess said he doesn’t see many people reading. So, when naming his bookstore, he wanted to reflect the courage people do when picking a book.
“The word ‘brave’ its just something pretty exciting because we’ve always felt like these days, with technology and everybody having a phone in their hand and e-books and things like that, everything is competing for your attention. Just picking up a book and reading it is an act of courage and opening up a bookstore is an act of courage,” Burgess said.
Brave Books puts events for the community to come out, enjoy and possibly learn from.
“We’ll always have special events. Like, we’ll have a Banned Book event, it’s a three-day event that happens in Sept., which is Banned Book Month. We’ll just bring in a couple of hundred of banned books, educate people and do a lot of things. We’ll also have a round table discussion out on the porch. People are always wanting to know why books are banned,” Burgess said.
Burgess wants to help the change in the community, where El Paso ranks low in literacy levels across the nation. According to a 2023 literacy rate research summary by Zippia, El Paso was one of the top three cities with the lowest literacy rates.
“El Paso is just one of the cities that has one of the lowest literacy rates. It’s the bottom five, consistently every year and so we wanted to create a very special space for people, especially younger people, and get excited about picking up a physical book with actual paper, taking them home and reading them. We just really believe that books are life-changing and mind-altering,” he said.
Burgess hopes that whoever walks into the door, is greeted with open arms and a friendly smile.
“We love people, we love serving people. We love to treat people because they’re important to us. We like to create things that make them feel special and they’re valued. We provide good books that help them continue growing as people and advancing. We love to challenge people to expand their thoughts, minds and their attitudes about who they are and grow as human beings,” Burgess said.
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