Larimer Square's only bookstore is hosting its first Blue Book Festival this weekend. Little Blue Pigeon, the independent shop at 1413 Larimer St., will hold the festival Saturday, with free activities, tents, and 30 Colorado authors along Larimer Street between 14th and 15th streets from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.
The free festival also features two ticketed events with New York Times-bestselling headliners: Alexis Nikole Nelson, the social media forager known as the “Black Forager” who wrote Happy Snacking, Don't Die!, and humorist Jenny Lawson, who released How to Be Okay When Nothing Is Okay this past March. As The Denver Post reports, Nelson is a James Beard Award winner who has built a massive following sharing wild plant education and food history, according to WOSU Public Media. Lawson, meanwhile, owns Nowhere Bookshop in San Antonio and previously wrote the bestselling memoirs Furiously Happy and Broken, per Nowhere Bookshop.
Little Blue Pigeon opened on Larimer Square on April 1 as a 1,000-square-foot shop stocked with more than 4,500 books, and the Post notes the block had gone decades without a dedicated bookstore before Dungan arrived, per her own account and the paper's research dating the gap back to the late 1970s. Founder and owner Paige Dungan, a former book publicist, told the Post that literary festivals introduce people to the written word in an approachable way.
A Block Built on Books, Not Competition
Rather than framing the festival as a solo showcase, Dungan is inviting other Denver booksellers to share the street, including The Shop at MATTER, West Side Books, Good Girl Books, and Denver Book Society, according to the same Post report. The Shop at MATTER, located on Market Street in the Ballpark District, is the region's only Black- and woman-owned independent bookstore and specializes in typography, design, activism, and social justice titles alongside a working letterpress, per RiNo Art District. West Side Books, a 29-year-old Highlands shop, downsized from 3,000 to 1,000 square feet in January under new owner Matt Aragon-Shafi, shifting its focus from used books to mostly new titles, as detailed by Denver Westword.
Dungan described Little Blue Pigeon as just a piece of the ecosystem, the Post reports, and she has put that philosophy into practice with a custom-designed map that points customers toward other local bookstores that might carry a title she doesn't stock. She has also said in-person events are key to attracting and sustaining readers, according to the same report.
A Donation Drive Tied to the Festival
The festival also includes a donation drive for BookGive, the Denver nonprofit that supplies used books to schools, shelters, and people without regular access to free literature and nonfiction, per the Post's reporting. BookGive, founded in 2019, distributes more than 8,000 free new and gently used books monthly across metro Denver and has delivered over 500,000 books to schools, shelters, and community facilities since its founding, according to ColoradoGives. The nonprofit operates out of a converted gas station on Lowell Boulevard and runs a free bookmobile named Electra. Little Blue Pigeon has its own giving pledge dating back to its opening, donating one book to local literacy organizations for every five books purchased in the shop, as reported by the Denver Gazette.
Larimer Square's Layered History
The block hosting Saturday's festival carries some of Denver's deepest preservation history. Larimer Street was the city's original 19th-century commercial main street before declining into skid row, and Larimer Square became Denver's first historic landmark district in July 1971 thanks to preservationist Dana Crawford, who helped save the 1400 block from urban renewal demolition, according to the Colorado Encyclopedia. Inside the shop itself, local studio Lupine Designs hand-painted wall art depicting classic literary characters including Winnie-the-Pooh and Alice in Wonderland, a detail Dungan has tied to the Eugene Field poem that gave the store its name.
Bookselling's National Rebound
The festival arrives amid a broader national rebound for independent bookstores. The American Booksellers Association reported 3,281 member locations in 2025, up from 2,844 in 2024. Regionally, the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association, which has members across 14 states, reported 18 member bookstores opened in 2025, with five more opening as of spring 2026.
That growth stands in contrast to the fate of Denver's former flagship independent, Tattered Cover, which filed for bankruptcy in late 2023 after decades as the city's preeminent bookseller before Barnes & Noble acquired the 53-year-old chain out of Chapter 11 for $1.83 million in July 2024. Little Blue Pigeon's rise on Larimer Square follows a string of retail and restaurant turnovers on the same block, including the arrival of Som Dee Signature and the shift from Dumplin' to Romyo earlier this year.
