The Reading Room

Is there a better pairing than a good book and a great drink? You can find both at this cozy bar on the east side of Chattanooga.  But the books lining the walls of the Reading Room are not just decoration. They are for sale, and their journey began, appropriately enough, at the library.

The Reading Room is part neighborhood watering hole, part used bookstore, a combination dreamed up by the owner, Linden Marno-Ferree, after working on both sides of the equation. Before entering the restaurant industry and becoming a bartender, Marno-Ferree worked as a bookseller at Harvard Book Store in Massachusetts and Politics and Prose in Washington, D.C. She eventually began imagining a place that combined the conviviality of a bar with the comfortable solitude of a bookstore.

Then she found the perfect partner in the Chattanooga Public Library Foundation. Books supplied through the library partnership fill the Reading Room’s shelves, and a portion of sales goes back to the foundation. The shop currently advertises every book at $8 or less.

The result feels more like an eccentric reader's living room than a conventional bookstore. Floor-to-ceiling shelves meet exposed brick, vintage chandeliers, mismatched furniture, and plenty of corners suitable for disappearing into a novel. Drinks range from beer and cocktails to nonalcoholic options, while coffee and tea give daytime readers something to linger over. And there is a modest food menu as well, so there’s no need to put down what you’re reading.

Then there is the calendar. The Reading Room describes itself as a community hub for "creatives, free-thinkers, weirdos and regular nice people," and its programming backs that up. Its schedule regularly includes author readings, writers’ and craft nights, bingo, comedy, bookish trivia, drag events, ambient music, and live “Drunk History” performances.

It is, in other words, a bookstore where staying until midnight is perfectly reasonable, and a bar where leaving with a used paperback might be the most predictable ending.