Under Charlie's Covers, the beloved used bookstore in Bernalillo, has closed permanently, but its extensive collection didn't go far. A new shop called Bookish, on Albuquerque's West Side near the Rio Rancho border, has acquired the collection built by owner Lara Harrison and reopened it for a new generation of readers.
Bookish is owned by Angela Shiver, who held the store's official grand opening on Halloween, according to the Rio Rancho Observer. The event, held at Paseo del Norte and Golf Course Road, drew hundreds of avid readers throughout the day, per the same report. Shiver said she gained a friend through the process of buying the collection from Harrison, who helped her open the new store.
A Customer Turned Business Owner
Shiver had been a customer of Harrison's for years before Under Charlie's Covers closed, the Observer reports. Watching Harrison sell off her collection is what pushed Shiver to decide to open her own store, rather than simply mourn the loss of a favorite haunt. Reading has always been her passion, Shiver said, and she and her husband also own a concrete company separate from the new bookstore venture.
According to the Observer's reporting, Shiver had set her sights on opening a bookstore about two years before Bookish's debut, though she originally envisioned the timeline stretching out to about five years. Watching Harrison's collection become available accelerated those plans considerably.
Building Under Charlie's Covers, One Collection at a Time
Harrison started Under Charlie's Covers because her father had amassed a large collection of his own. She told the Rio Rancho Observer in 2020 that she opened her business in 2009, and a later report put her late father's collection at 18,000 books in total, which formed the foundation of her store. By August 2020, Under Charlie's Covers held more than 40,000 books at its location at 160 South Camino del Pueblo in Bernalillo, where Harrison had just signed a five-year lease extension.
That same 2020 report captured how the pandemic reshaped the secondhand book trade locally: Harrison said books traded in were up 25 percent from the year before, even as overall sales transactions ran about 20 percent lower. In January 2026, Harrison announced the store would close in May and that she was searching for a book lover to buy her ready-made shop, with customers able to use existing store credit for a couple more months, per the Observer's reporting at the time.
Shelving 60,000 Books in Ten Weeks
Preparing the new space took about 10 weeks of work leading up to the Halloween opening, during which Bookish staff shelved roughly 60,000 books, according to the Observer. The store is now cataloging its inventory into a digital system, something Harrison's shop never had. So far, Bookish has scanned mystery thrillers and titles from A through T, covering about 12,000 books, which represents roughly a fifth of the store's total inventory.
Bookish also plans to notify customers when a book they're searching for comes back into stock, a service tied to that growing digital catalog. Shiver plans to start a trade-in program allowing customers to earn store credit, mirroring the kind of system longtime Under Charlie's Covers regulars were used to. One thing won't carry over, though: existing store credit from the old Bernalillo shop cannot be transferred to Bookish, since the two businesses remain legally separate despite sharing a collection and, in some sense, a spirit.
