{"id":12857,"date":"2025-06-25T06:55:06","date_gmt":"2025-06-25T06:55:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/12857\/"},"modified":"2025-06-25T06:55:06","modified_gmt":"2025-06-25T06:55:06","slug":"olga-sofia-lijo-serans-on-a-juneau-bookstores-50-year-legacy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/12857\/","title":{"rendered":"Olga Sofia Lij\u00f3 Ser\u00e1ns on a Juneau bookstore’s 50-year legacy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hearthside Books owner Olga Sofia Lij\u00f3 Ser\u00e1ns inside the business\u2019s downtown storefront on June 16, 2025. (Photo by Yvonne Krumrey\/KTOO)<\/p>\n

This is Tongass Voices, a series from KTOO sharing weekly perspectives from the homelands of the \u00c1ak\u2019w Kw\u00e1an and beyond.<\/p>\n

A Juneau bookstore turns 50 this year. Earlier this month, it was voted one of the nation\u2019s top 10 best independent bookstores<\/a> by USA Today.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

Olga Sofia Lij\u00f3 Ser\u00e1ns took over Hearthside Books in 2022, but she got into the book business as a librarian in Juneau nearly two decades ago after arriving from Northern Spain. \u00a0<\/p>\n

https:\/\/media.ktoo.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/TV_Olga.mp3<\/a><\/p>\n

The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.<\/p>\n

Olga Sofia Lij\u00f3 Ser\u00e1ns: <\/b>I love Waiting for the Weather. Eric Forrer\u2019s memoir. It just has so much information about Alaska without being ponderous. Actually, it\u2019s pretty funny. So it\u2019s a great way to just have a very good look at Alaska without thinking that you are studying on it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

My name is long. It\u2019s Olga Sophia Lij\u00f3 Ser\u00e1ns, and I am the owner of Hearthside Books and Toys. I was approached about buying Hearthside Books around three years ago, about this time of the year, by somebody else who thought that I could be a good match, because Hearthside\u00a0 had been for sale for a while, and well, nobody in this town wanted it to close.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not sure why people thought about me. I have my guesses. I\u2019m a book person. I\u2019ve been always very active in the community. Since I arrived in Juneau in 2007, I got my master\u2019s in library science. I already had two degrees in similar subjects, and then I became a public librarian, and then I became librarian for the Legislative Affairs agency.\u00a0<\/p>\n

So between that and the fact that I\u2019m always around books, I guess it was not very strange that somebody would have thought about me.\u00a0<\/p>\n

What brought me to Juneau in the first place was love. My then love interest invited me for a holiday in 2006 and that was it. He was definitely a love interest, but Juneau just closed the deal.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The big surprise was bestsellers and having to be on top of those changes almost daily. So it makes it a little bit terrifying, because you\u2019re always having to be thinking about what\u2019s coming next and what\u2019s going to be people\u2019s next interest. But on the other hand, it\u2019s also exhilarating, a lot of fun. Will that set of books that were really, really hot two weeks ago arrive in time for being still of interest when they get here?<\/p>\n

Hearthside is turning 50 on September 19. It was open in September 19, 1975. So I wasn\u2019t thinking about what that would mean when I initially bought the store. But it has become more and more obvious that people in Juneau consider Hearthside a legacy.\u00a0<\/p>\n

When you have three generations of the same family coming to you and saying, \u201cYou know, my mom used to bring me to Hearthside as a kid, and now I\u2019m bringing my own kids here too.\u201d It kind of makes you realize how important an independent bookstore is still in a community like Juneau.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hearthside Books owner Olga Sofia Lij\u00f3 Ser\u00e1ns inside the business\u2019s downtown storefront on June 16, 2025. (Photo by…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":12858,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[1022,13622,171,13623,13624,13625,13626,67,132,68,13627,13628],"class_list":{"0":"post-12857","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-bookstore","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-eric-forrer","12":"tag-hearthside-books","13":"tag-hearthside-books-and-toys","14":"tag-olga-lijo-serans","15":"tag-united-states","16":"tag-unitedstates","17":"tag-us","18":"tag-usa-today","19":"tag-waiting-for-the-weather"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114742697849462107","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12857","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12857"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12857\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12858"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}